


my head is bloody, but unbowed.

by lovelyorbent



Series: invictus. [2]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Disabled Character, Gen, Yancy Becket Lives, probably some background Alison/Tendo/Yancy at some point
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-14
Updated: 2015-02-25
Packaged: 2018-03-12 21:30:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 31,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3355958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelyorbent/pseuds/lovelyorbent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the obligatory 'yancy lives through knifehead' fic.</p><p>neither becket brother emerges unscathed, pentecost is extremely done with everyone, the bureaucracy sucks, and the kaiju don't just stop coming because the world is ending.  in fact, that's kind of their thing.</p><p>or: yancy learns to live without a lot of things he thought were necessary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Anchorage; March 2020.

**Author's Note:**

> also known as: still can't keep my fucking hands off yancy becket i'm sorry i promise never to be this prolific ever again. this chapter is kind of short compared to some of the ones for this
> 
> if it helps i split this one into chapters instead of it just being the massive orgy of me writing yancy that my last go 'round was. actually that would probably help more if i had planned any of this at length lol some day i'll know what a plot is
> 
> title from the poem by william ernest henley, 'invictus'. i really enjoy that poem. i think it's perfect for yancy.

Yancy Becket doesn’t die, in Anchorage.

The _Saltchuck_ is the only reason.  He’s unconscious and sinking when Knifehead bites it, but even though they’re buffeted away by the waves, they see him when he falls and they come after him.  None of them are stupid enough to jump into water with this much Blue in it, so they use a net, hoping, as Gipsy Danger is staggering off into the distance, and they’re lucky enough to get him on their first cast.

He’s not breathing; his lungs are filled with water.  His left side is covered in Blue.

One of the fishermen triple-wraps his hands in plastic and shoves them into heavy leather gloves, then covers those in more plastic and starts ripping the drivesuit off of him while one of the others is pumping his chest and trying to give him mouth-to-mouth, which is hard, because there’s not much room in his lungs for air, what with all the water in there.

They lose his pulse midway through the third cycle of compressions.  But then the guy tearing the Blue-covered armor off his body and throwing it overboard starts on the right side, and the suit, burned into his skin, tears him open as it comes free.

The pain must come as some kind of a shock, because his eyes fly open and he starts vomiting, spilling water and bile all over the deck.

His dog tags are burned into his chest.  They don’t mess with those.

By the time he gets to a hospital he’s unconscious again, in shock.

* * *

 

He wakes up two weeks later from a medically induced coma and can’t move; he’s held in place. He panics, body convulsing, and someone in the chair next to the bed shoots up, running for a nurse. He has no idea who it is, he can’t turn his head because of the cast they have on his neck.

Calming him down takes a shot of morphine that he tries to refuse—but he can’t get the words out. When he manages to speak again, it’s stammering and difficult, but he rasps out, “Where am I?”

The nurse pushes his hair back from his forehead with a cool hand and replies,  “Providence Alaska Medical Center, Ranger Becket.”

He doesn’t remember why he’s here.  “What happened?”

_Why is it so hard to speak?_

“Your Jaeger was badly damaged in a fight in the bay,” she says.  “Two weeks ago tomorrow.”

Yancy feels terror rise in his throat, remembering being torn out of the conn pod, trying to tear himself out of the Drift, remembers the darkness and the claws and the water and the Blue.  Remembers Raleigh, screaming, and the machines by the side of the bed start making noise faster and faster, beeping out the rise in his pulse and breathing. “My brother,” he says. “Where’s my brother? Where’s Raleigh?” These are the first words that come out smoothly.

“Recuperating in the Shatterdome’s medical clinic,” she says, rubbing his shoulder like she’s trying to calm him down, but the machines only decrease their wild screaming slightly.

“Is he hurt?”

She says “Shh, shh,” and he wants her to stop fucking patronizing him and tell him Raleigh’s all right, which probably shows on his face, because she answers a few seconds later. “He piloted Gipsy Danger to shore by himself.  As far as I know, other than the circuitry burns, he’s all right physically, but I’m told his brain damage may be serious.”

“Raleigh,” he says, can’t think of another word.  He opens his mouth to try, but instead of what he means to say, he says, “ _Je dois le voir_.”

She frowns at him. “What’s that, Mr. Becket?”

“I,” he grits out, the action harder than it should be, “I have to—to see him.”

“He’s not really responsive, from what I’ve heard,” she says.

As he’s trying to muster an angry retort, he hears the door open and a deep voice say, “Please refrain from reporting rumour as fact, Miss Salvadore.”

It’s the Marshal. Yancy’s pulse spikes again, a little.

“I’m not here to reprimand you, Ranger Becket,” Pentecost says, which is uncanny, really. The nurse is leaving, muttering something about grabbing the report, which makes no sense to Yancy until Pentecost continues.  “I was told you woke up half an hour ago.  As such, I’m here for a report on your condition.”

“Is Raleigh all right?” Yancy asks him. He’s on too much morphine to really feel his pain, but it’s somewhere in the back of his mind where the ghost drift _isn’t_.

“Your brother suffered minor nervous damage to his left arm and required skin grafts on one of his legs. And Miss Salvadore was right, although I don’t appreciate her tendency for gossip: he’s nonresponsive. He’s lucid, but refuses to speak. So it’s difficult to assess the extent of any damage to his mind.”  His voice is all business.  Yancy stupidly wants someone to tell him that everything is going to be okay, even though he knows that someone wouldn’t be Pentecost.  He kind of wants his mother, but that ship sailed a long time ago.

“I’m s—” The word doesn’t come to his mouth easily, and he has to restart it.  He’s afraid to question that, wants to blame it on the morphine. “I’m sorry for—for disobeying orders—sir.”  The double “s” is difficult.

Pentecost’s face is unreadable.  But Yancy, as someone who spent a long time being tired of his job, can see in his eyes for a moment that familiar flash of weariness.  “You and your brother will be officially reprimanded for that when you’ve recovered enough for the court-martial.  Until then, it’s pointless to discuss it.”

Yancy reads between the lines and drops the apology.  “Can I see my brother?”

“That will depend upon the report Miss Salvadore is about to read to us.  Start from the top for Mr. Becket, Miss Salvadore.”

Yancy hadn’t even realized the nurse had come back, he can’t see her, but she starts reading. “Ah—the patient was brought in with a lot of skin damage, four broken ribs on the right side from impact with the water and several cracked vertebrae, presumably, again, from impact with the water. Internal damage also included a ruptured spleen and lacerations to the liver—although you were lucky, Ranger Becket, you didn’t swallow any of the kaiju’s blood.”  Yancy wonders if this is supposed to actually make him feel better, because it kind of doesn’t.  He remembers the Blue so clearly.  “Unfortunately, there was some hypoxia due to the length of time before you were resuscitated.  We’ll do some tests to see if there was any serious damage now that you’re awake.” With some dread, he thinks of his speech, but she continues.  ”During the surgery to remove your spleen and part of your liver and repair other minor internal damage, you suffered complications on the table—a stroke—which may be causing some of your difficulty speaking.  Aphasia isn’t uncommon in cases like this.”  As if he knows what that means.

He breaks in to try and lighten the situation, he doesn’t know why, only he can’t handle any more of this list in sequence right now.  “G—give it to me straight, doc.  What other bits did I—did I fuck up?”

She pauses. He can tell she has bad news before she said it.  “We—your drivesuit and your rescuers kept most of the Blue away from your skin, but I’m afraid some got through at the knee joint of your left leg and you suffered some contamination.”

 _Blue poisoning_ , he thinks with his heart sinking. How the hell have they kept him alive for two weeks?  Why doesn’t he feel any more like shit than he does?  “Oh.”

“We removed your leg a few inches below the hip,” she says, voice gentle. “We’re still monitoring the situation, but there appears to be no more contamination.”

Yancy’s heart monitor starts whistling when he tries to sit up to look, which sends pain up his spine, but it doesn’t matter.  He needs to see it isn’t true.  He needs to see.

He can’t breathe. Everything’s under the sheets, and he can’t see it, and he can’t breathe.

They have to put him under before she even gets to the long-term prognosis because he’s panicking and the pumping of his lungs might disturb his healing ribs.

* * *

 

“Your scarring is major,” Pentecost tells him when he comes to again.  “And they’re not certain if you’ll walk again because of the injuries to your spine.”

Yancy has to swallow around his grief; the subtext here is this: his days as a Ranger are over. He knew it already, with only one leg, but this is like the end of an era, hearing out loud that he may be spending the rest of his life in the wheelchair.  It makes him feel helpless in a way he hasn’t in a long time. The Marshal diplomatically ignores the tears starting to streak down his face unbidden.  ”But once the risk of another stroke has decreased, we can move you to our facility so you can see your brother.”

“Thank you, sir,” Yancy chokes out.

Pentecost puts his hand on his shoulder for a moment, then stands up and leaves the room.

Yancy kind of appreciates that.


	2. Anchorage; March/April 2020.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my planning is as limited as my ability to sit through my own writing enough to proofread it properly.

The damage to his torso makes it hard for them to put him in a proper brace for his spine. Which, in turn, makes him difficult to transport.

They airlift him back to the ‘dome, but then moving him requires a stretcher—a wheelchair is too much stress on the breaks.  He’s kind of high as a kite, because landing and takeoff both jostle him too fucking much, and he barely notices that they bring him in one of the back doors instead of anywhere near the front until he’s sobered up enough to be grateful for it.

Eight people carry him inside.  He has no idea why that many are required until, weeks later, he thinks to check the news sites and all the press photos of him being moved are grainy--because they'd done it in the middle of the night, the clever bastards--and don't show any part of him, because he's shielded by bodies.

Dimly, he remembers through the morphine haze that the man at his left shoulder had been Zeke Amarok, Chrome Brutus' right pilot, and as they'd come through the doors, someone had said, "Welcome home."

* * *

 

When the pain wakes him up the next morning Raleigh is sitting in the chair by his bed, watching him. Or Yancy thinks he’s watching him, at first, but upon closer examination—from his periphery, because he still can’t turn his head—he thinks Raleigh is staring at the wall behind his bed instead.

“Raleigh,” he says, dismayed to find his voice hoarse again, and Raleigh jumps like he’s been electrified. Yancy kind of wants to laugh, but he’s also kind of in pain.  “C—could you hit the button on that—?”  He can’t think of the right word, but Raleigh doesn’t need to hear it, he just reaches woodenly for the bedside table and does.

Yancy hates morphine. He remembers the smell of it from Dominique’s decline and he doesn’t fancy being as strung out as her.  But fucking hell, he hurts.  His arms are both immobilized to keep him from fucking up his grafts or his spine, and he swears he can feel every nick they put in him during the surgery.

And it helps, much as he hates it. “Thanks, kid,” he says.

Raleigh doesn’t say anything, just stands up, bends down, braces himself against the bed under Yancy to kiss his cheeks, one after the other, _faire du bise_ , and then sits back down.  He looks drawn and stressed and too thin, and Yancy’s main purpose since he was eighteen has been keeping him from looking like this.  “Hey,” he starts, and wishes he could reach out, but he _can’t_ , fucking slings, “Don’t—don’t worry about me, kiddo. I’m going to—going to—to be fine.”

Raleigh snorts. Yancy tries to communicate his disapproval about this pessimism the way he’s always done when Raleigh is pessimistic, which is through a very unimpressed facial expression, but he can _feel_ his face refusing to obey him properly.  Raleigh looks at him and his mouth twitches a little, though, so he guesses he can live with that.

“D—dumbass,” he says, which was definitely not the word he’d meant to use, he’d meant to say _Raleigh_ , but he figures they’re synonymous anyway, so whatever. “You should see the other guy.”

Raleigh doesn’t smile. Looks a little bit like he _can’t_. But he does raise his eyebrows.

“W—when was the last time you slept, kid?”  Yancy asks him after it’s been silent between them for a while.  They’re good with silence, the two of them, but this isn’t really _normal_. Raleigh waves him off, so Yancy sighs and continues.  “C’mon, Rals, t—talk to me.”  Raleigh looks like he’s considering it.  Yancy studies his face and then narrows his eyes.  “I won’t _tell_ them you talked to me.”

Raleigh clears his throat, and says, quietly, “I don’t want to talk to any of them.”

Yancy suddenly wants to laugh again, wants to hug him.  Thinks of his little brother thinking to himself, _well, I don’t want to talk to the press on this one_ and just shutting it down, then realizing he was in too deep to stop pretending now.  What a little shit. “Are you okay?”

Raleigh pauses. “I’ve got a headache and my arm’s kind of fucked up, but my leg’s better than it was.”

Yancy knows he knows that wasn’t what he meant.  “Heard.” He’s started shortening his sentences to prevent himself from fucking them up so much.  ”You know w—what I meant.”

Raleigh’s face visibly shutters.  And he doesn’t say anything.  And Yancy stops wanting to laugh at the idea of him just _up and deciding not to talk_ , because that’s clearly not the only thing that’s going on here.  Still kind of wants to hug him, though.

“Oh, kid,” he says. It’s kind of a sigh.

Raleigh looks away.

Yancy just lets the silence rest.  Thinks to himself, _poor kid_. Raleigh speaks up after a long time, but he’s looking straight at the floor.  His voice is quiet, close to a whisper.  “I fucked up, Yance.  I got you hurt. We can’t pilot again, we can’t—Gipsy’s going to be gone.”

It hurts more when Raleigh says it than when he thinks it.  Because other than Raleigh and Jazmine, probably the best thing that’s ever happened to him is Gipsy.  But Raleigh’s also a fucking idiot.

“ _You_ didn’t get me hurt,” Yancy tells him. “Kaiju did.  You know, the big glowing thing, with the teeth and the poison blood?”  The part of him that is determined to maintain peak asshole status through all of this notes snidely that his voice is pretty steady when he’s being a sarcastic piece of shit. “And besides, w—when you’re in a Jaeger, _you_ don’t fuck—fuck up. _We_ fuck up.  ‘s not your fault.” He pauses.  Raleigh’s looking at him like he’s saying something special. But he knows damn well Raleigh’s not going to change just because he said something special, so his optimism is limited on how much better this is going to make his brother feel.

“Yancy,” Raleigh says.

That’s all he says. Yancy waits for him to finish, but he stops there.

“C’mere.”

Raleigh stares at him like he’s grown a second head.  “What?”

“Come here. G—give me a hug. I have some—some—some spinal integrity issues right now, d—don’t make me come over there.”

His brother looks incredulous. “I’ll _hurt_ _you_.”

“Survived a kaiju. I‘m p—practically invincible.”

Raleigh still looks like he thinks it’s a terrible idea, but he’s historically been really good at tagging along with Yancy’s terrible ideas.  So he stands up again, leans over, carefully, and hugs his brother, obviously trying to put as little weight as possible on him, keep his hands away from anywhere bandaged, which is pretty much everywhere.

It’s agonizing.

“Oh god, bad idea,” Yancy gasps, “bad idea,” and Raleigh whips back like he’s pulled a gun, and then, in the most wounded tone of voice Yancy’s ever heard, exclaims—

“I _told_ you!”

Yancy laughs almost involuntarily, and his eyes go wide, because that is also nauseatingly painful. “Oh god, Jesus. Why does everything fucking hurt?”

“On the bright side,” Raleigh says, looking kind of like he wants to laugh too, which Yancy takes as a good sign. “When you’re yelling, you don’t stammer.”

“You’re a dick, R—Raleigh.”

“It takes one to know one.”

If Yancy could reach out his arm, he’d be messing up Raleigh’s hair, saying _it’s gonna be okay, kid_.  But he can’t, so he just has to settle for smiling at him.  “—you can’t j—just keep not talking to everyone.” Raleigh looks back at the floor, sitting back in his chair.  Yancy doesn’t like this new trend of him silently avoiding his eyes when he doesn’t want to talk about something.  He needs one of his hands to pull his chin back up and make him face it, but he doesn't have one, so he slips some authority into his voice and does it that way.  “Quit shutting me out.  F—fuck, I don’t care if you talk to—to the shrinks, but qu—” When his voice stutters out on him this time, he just plows through the word instead of repeating it, creates a too-long pause in the middle of the single syllable, “—it doing that to me.”

Raleigh immediately looks profoundly guilty.  “Yancy—”

“’m s—serious, Raleigh.  Don’t—don’t need two legs t—to kick your ass.”

Finally, Raleigh flashes a smile.  It’s quick, but it’s good enough.  It’s something. “I could just hug you, Yance, and you’d go down screaming.”

“G—go fuck yourself.”

“I love you too,” Raleigh says, and Yancy forgets about his leg and the ache in his torso and shooting up his hip and spine for a moment.  He knows it’s sarcastic, but he can’t help it. He smiles.

But he doesn’t forget about how dark the circles under Raleigh’s eyes are, how his hair looks like he hasn’t washed it for a couple of days, how his cheeks are hollowing slightly, the way Yancy has been trying to prevent for what feels like his whole life. “You n—need to get some sleep, kiddo. Y—you look like hell.”

“I felt you _die in my head_ , Yancy,” Raleigh says, and this, this is probably the problem along with his guilt. His voice is acidic, which Yancy, who is an expert in all things reading-Raleigh related, takes to mean that he’s trying to deflect from thinking about it. “You’re gonna have to forgive me if I’m not sleeping real well.”

Yancy almost asks for another hug, but he’s not an _idiot_.

“Then—then go get something t—to eat.  A—and take a shower.  You’re rank.” He, personally, is eating through a tube, right now, mostly because it’s embarrassing to have to be fed and it’s time-consuming as hell, not because there’s anything wrong with his digestive system. It and his right leg, in fact, are pretty much all that have been left unscathed.

“Thanks, Yance.  I’m feeling the love.”

The return of Raleigh’s piss-poor attempt at a sense of humour is encouraging.  So is the fact that he’s standing up like he’s going to obey. “I tell you these things b— _because_ I love you.”

“You said that when you showed me how to put a condom on a banana, asshole.” Raleigh leans over and carefully kisses his cheek again.  It’s not something they usually do, but Yancy surmises it’s about all he feels he can do when one of them is an unhuggable mass of pain.  “I’ll be back in half an hour, okay?”

“Take y—your time,” Yancy calls after him as he’s walking out the door, even though he kind of wants Raleigh back the second he’s gone.  Without him there’s no distraction from the pains that can’t be entirely stifled by the very limited dose of morphine he can give himself, and it’s boring.  He hadn’t realized how totally mind-numbing it was to lie in a bed for hours until it was hard to sleep because his pain levels are constantly averaging a five or six even on the morphine.

“I’m p—pissed about the leg,” he tells Tendo when he comes by a couple of days later. It makes the loss of it easier when he jokes about it.  It also helps that he hasn’t tried to walk yet, he suspects.  “But—but mostly I’m pissed about the f—fact that _I can’t sleep_.”

“Yancy Becket?  Unable to sleep?  Look on the bright side,” Tendo says, and this phrase, in the last few weeks of Yancy’s life, has only ever been followed by someone unnecessarily ripping on him, so he’s totally unsurprised when he finishes it: “Your awesome scars might have a fighting chance of increasing your sex appeal.”

“Y—yeah, I’ll be be—beating them off with—with a stick,” Yancy replies, rolling his eyes. “How’s Alison?”

“Cuter than you.”

“N—nobody’s cuter than me.”

“If that’s what helps you sleep better at night.”

He can tell Tendo’s sort of being a little bit extra of a jerk to him to help him feel normal. To help him not feel coddled, which honestly, he feels way too often.  Less here than at Providence, but _Jesus_.  He thinks Raleigh’s kind of doing it too, except Raleigh’s showing the strain of what they've lost, too. So it’s not so glaringly obvious.

Jazmine writes asking after his condition, which has been miraculously kept from the media.  He can't write back, so he dictates and Raleigh writes, which takes _forever_ , because he keeps tripping over his words.  For some reason, it goes faster when he speaks in French or Japanese.  His Portuguese has vanished almost entirely, somehow.

His brother, who can move just fine, reads to him when they’re alone because he can’t move his neck or his arms to do it himself and even the two of them can only talk for so long before it turns into a circus of shitty insults and bad jokes.  He still won’t talk in front of Tendo or Pentecost or anyone else who comes by to visit, not, Yancy thinks, because he doesn’t trust them, but because it would mean having to explain himself and Raleigh really doesn’t appear to want to have that conversation.

In fact, he still hasn’t really had that conversation with Yancy himself.

But then, Yancy hasn’t asked.

He’s waiting for Raleigh to say it himself, the way he mostly always has about important things. Dominique had never pushed him to tell her anything, so he’d told her everything.  He’s been applying the same theory to his little brother as long as he can remember.

* * *

 

Pentecost walks in, about two weeks after Yancy gets moved to the medical center, while Raleigh is reading _The Telltale Heart_ to him aloud and Yancy can’t really talk fast enough at the moment to protect him from the blowback on this one. He’s almost terrified for his brother, assumes he’s going to get chewed out.   Mercifully, he’s only hooked up to one monitor of his vital signs now, and it doesn’t beep, so it doesn’t give him away, although it does bring a nurse to the door of the room, looking panicked until she sees him sitting there, in no apparent distress.

Raleigh gets lucky.  Pentecost comes to the conclusion that Yancy’s presence is the solution, which, actually, he’s not really wrong about at all, because Raleigh continues to show no interest in talking to anyone else, and has Raleigh’s hospital bed—they’re still keeping him under observation—moved into his brother's room.

Raleigh’s first words to someone who isn’t Yancy after Knifehead are a very quiet, “Thank you, sir.”

And he goes to therapy after that.


	3. Anchorage; April-June 2020.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if anybody knows where i'm going with this it would be great if they would tell me

They end up having to “structurally reinforce” Yancy’s spine, a process which involves something called _bone cement_ and metal rods, neither of which sound like things he wants put in his back, but he does want to walk again, so he gives them the go-ahead for the surgery without much of a thought to it.  They finally take off the bandages and the suction for the skin grafts the day before they wheel him in for that one, and he tries hard not to be dismayed by what a fucking wreck he’s pretty sure he looks like.

(He still can’t look at the worst of the damage because the brace he’s in still doesn’t allow him to tip his head down that far.)

Raleigh’s right there with him until they shut the door to the room.

* * *

 

Starting physical therapy is painful and slow and embarrassing.

Yancy has always been able to do things for himself.  It’s sort of important to him, his ability to function on his own, to be self-sufficient—he’s never, ever been okay with getting something for nothing, has always loathed being babied.

He admits he could be better about manning up and asking for help sometimes, but this is sort of a harsh way for the universe to teach him a lesson.

The physical therapist at first almost doesn’t know what to do with him—at this point, there are so many things wrong with him that he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t know where to start if he were her, either.  His muscles have seriously atrophied, lying in bed for almost a month—his leg makes it hard for a lot of strength exercises and his spine means he’s pretty much SOL on flexibility, and while the artificial skin grafts all down his right arm and side have passed the official point where he’s allowed to stretch them again with exercise, it’s still not a great idea to push it, so that takes out about the other half of available strength exercises.

He can move, though.  Sort of. They let him have a wheelchair, which means he’s mobile, at least.  His arms aren’t strong enough to really push him at first, so Raleigh mostly does it, but it’s better than lying in a bed all day.

And his arms—they’ll get stronger.

But it’s still fucking embarrassing to have to do exercises so basic and light a child could do them when two months ago a magazine had been calling him a Captain America lookalike.  It’s even more embarrassing with a trainer watching him, assessing him with a blank face. He’s working hard, but the results aren’t fantastic, in his opinion, and he still can’t do simple things for himself like open doors.

So it’s frustrating, too.

The first prosthetic they get him harnesses at his hips, which doesn’t really work because that’s too much stress on the grafts just yet. The second one, which they sort of make up on the fly, won’t stay on, understandably, because there’s nowhere for it to attach to.

They suggest drilling into the bone to create a platform for attachment, but the horrified look on Yancy’s face when they describe the procedure pretty well convinces them to drop that idea, so they're just stuck waiting on the grafts.

Raleigh follows him everywhere except into the actual therapy.  It’s sort of like he’s trying to make sure Yancy’s still alive, which is equal parts touching, concerning, and a little sad. It sort of reminds him, though, of the first ten or so years of his life, which had heavily featured Raleigh tagging around after him like a little lost puppy.

But for all his brother’s concern, he’s somehow the only person in the place who doesn’t keep trying to do things for him.  Is somehow the only one who gets that Yancy would rather dance with the door and the chair for five minutes and open it himself than have someone come running in to rescue him like a damsel in distress.

He guesses he shouldn’t be surprised.  They are, after all, drift-compatible.  They know each other better than they know themselves.

Once his right leg is strong enough to hold his weight for short periods of time, they give him a pair of crutches in therapy and have him hop around on those for a while.  A few weeks after that, he’s using them more than the wheelchair, although he has to sit down more often than he’d like.  He doesn’t really leave the medical wing, partially because they have yet to issue him clothes that fit and don’t look like hospital gowns, and partially because he doesn’t want anyone to see him fall down, which he still does, sometimes.

One of the techs, coming to say hi, makes the mistake of giving an aborted laugh at him once when he trips.  Which, if he were in a better mood about his new disability, he might be understanding about, but instead, Yancy, widely known for being the calmer of the two of the Becket brothers, gives him a look so sharp it could cut glass as Raleigh helps him to his feet—foot?—snaps, “Get out.”

The guy looks so contrite he’s almost stricken, which would usually be good enough for Yancy, but it fucking isn’t today.  “I’m—”

Raleigh cuts him off before he can finish, in a tone so absolutely deadly it honestly makes Yancy a little proud.  “He said _get out_.”

Therapy’s helping Raleigh, but even so, most of the time when he talks to people who aren’t Yancy, he’s speaking _for_ Yancy. And _that_ help, from Raleigh, he’ll take.  Because the stammering gets on _his_ nerves, so he _knows_ it’s getting on other people’s.  Or maybe because it’s Raleigh.  He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care.

He has his own therapy, past the physical.  Speech therapy, for what is not aphasia, a word he now knows the meaning of, but rather apraxia.  And regular therapy, where he talks to a psychiatrist about how he _feels_.

Yancy’s an honest guy, mostly.

He’s pretty in touch with his emotions, relatively speaking, although he's not always the best at showing them to other people.

But he fucking _hates_ therapy.

Unlike Raleigh, he’s not really suffering from any guilt about Knifehead. Raleigh’s psychological problems are twice as apparent as his, which he privately thinks can be chalked up to the fact that he _looks_ so much like hell, the inside of his head gets overlooked.  But he’s got them.  Has nightmares in a way he didn’t used to, about the Blue and the kaiju and mostly about his brother dying, even though he was the only one who was ever even close. He still doesn’t remember dying, but he remembers Raleigh feeling him die through the Drift, which is something that sort of makes his head hurt with its lack of logic.

Mostly what they talk about is his body image, though, which is a topic he’d really rather avoid, because lately, he really does hate thinking about his body. Hates how it fails him in every little thing he does, hates that he can’t even speak right.  Hates that his chest is a mess of burn scars and graft edges and that “BECKET, Y.  494 38 7445 A NEG PPDC” is stamped into the center of his chest, backwards.  Hates how he looks.  Hates how he moves.  Hates how everything is hard now and it’s never going to be easy again.

He guesses that feeling is why he’s in therapy.

He also, according to the therapist, has no small amount of anxiety over what’s going to happen when the PPDC finally decides to come down on their heads over disobedience that had left the world short a functioning Jaeger. Pentecost takes that into his own hands and just up and schedules the thing, which isn’t so much a court-martial as a bunch of guys in suits telling the two of them they’ve done a bad, bad thing, cost the PPDC a lot of money, fucked up their lives, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Which, frankly, both of them can kind of handle with their eyes closed, because it's not like they don't know.

They officially remove Yancy’s Ranger status, though, demoting him to Captain Becket, which isn’t really a demotion at all, but rather an equivalency. Raleigh’s status is still up in the air when the conference closes down.

Yancy had known it was coming.  But it still makes his chest hurt.  He thinks he can feel the pounding of his heart against the brand his dog tags have left right over it.

“Don’t they think we’ve been punished enough already?”  Raleigh asks him, bitterly, as if he’s forgetting that the Marshal is still in the room.  “It’s not like we’re going to have a chance to do it again.”

“It’s possible that you’ll be assigned an alternate copilot, Ranger Becket,” Pentecost points out, which Yancy hasn’t even thought about and which sends a bullet of totally unnecessary, hopeless envy through his mind.  “If you keep your active status and you’re cleared for duty by the doctors.”

Raleigh rounds on him, and Yancy’s right hand shoots out to grab him by the shoulder, nearly toppling him off the crutches, but he keeps talking anyway. “I don’t _want_ an alternate copilot.”

The Marshal’s eyes flash, dangerously, and Yancy pulls Raleigh backwards into line with him.  “S—sorry about him, sir,” he says, as quickly as he can manage, before Pentecost can tear Raleigh apart verbally.  “He’s—he’s just a litt—little touchy.  B—besides, Raleigh, you really think m—my leg’s worth a Jaeger to the PPDC?”

The weak stab at humour does nothing to calm Raleigh down.  He doesn’t crack a smile.  Just stares at Yancy with his teeth on edge, breathing shaky, like he’s trying to beam something into his brain.  But when Yancy glances at the Marshal, he’s relieved to note that Raleigh’s imminent doom has faded from his features.

“Permission to be dismissed, sir,” Raleigh says finally, from between still-grit teeth.

“Don’t raise your voice to me again, Mr. Becket,” Pentecost says, voice even. “You’re dismissed, but I expect you to wait to escort your brother back to your room.  You,” he says to Yancy, who is turning to follow as Raleigh is walking out, “Stay.”

“S—sorry about that, sir,” Yancy says when the door slams unnecessarily behind his brother.  It’s the sharp consonant sounds he has the most trouble with, mostly, but the long ones get him sometimes too.  Vowels he tends to manage just fine.  “He’s just upset about G—Gipsy.”

For once, the Marshal doesn’t cut him off when he says something that isn’t absolutely necessary to the conversation.  Just waits, patiently, until he can stutter it out, then ignores it. “There’s an administrative post open for you at the Academy when your recovery allows you to take it, Captain. Hercules Hansen has been covering the vacancy remotely for some time, but I believe it’s high time the duty was taken off his hands.”

Yancy winces.  “I c—can’t leave my—my brother, sir.”

Pentecost doesn’t look angry.  In fact, he kind of looks like he was expecting this, which, frankly, he probably was. “It’s likely we would be willing to cover your commute fees.  However, this isn’t an offer you need to accept or reject yet, Mr. Becket. In fact, it’s not even an offer yet.”

Yancy’s mouth twitches.  “Thank you, sir.”

“Your speech is improving,” the Marshal comments, then nods once, an approving duck of his chin.  “You’re dismissed.”

“Sir?”

Pentecost doesn’t repeat the _you’re dismissed_ the same way Yancy is pretty sure he’s about to.  Instead, he lifts his head again, looks Yancy in the eye, and raises his eyebrow. “Yes, Mr. Becket?”

“Got a lot of free t—time on my hands these—these days.  Know me’n Raleigh caused a lot of—a lot of trouble. So—if you have any b—busywork you need done—”

“I’ll see it finds its way to you.”

“I’d s—say thank you, sir, but I have a feeling I’ll regret I asked in a few days.”

They’ve had a discussion in speech therapy about him cutting his sentences short. So he’s trying to stop doing it.

“Say it anyway,” Pentecost says, crossing the room to turn off the blank screens. “I hear repetition is good for you.”

Yancy grins, crooked.  “Thank you, sir.”

“You’re dismissed.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You can stop repeating now, Mr. Becket,” Pentecost says as he’s hopping his way out of the room.  Raleigh, sitting outside the door, gets up and starts walking the second Yancy comes out, but Yancy reaches out to grab him by the shoulder again—with the wrong hand, the left one, and he almost falls, but Raleigh swings around to catch him.

“Thanks, k—kid,” he says, as Raleigh sets him upright again.  “Can I sit—sit down for a minute before we go?”

“Yeah,” Raleigh says, voice rough.  There’s nowhere but the floor, so he helps Yancy lower himself down, then slides down the wall next to him, staring across the hall.  “I’m serious, Yancy,” he says after a minute.

“About what?”

“I don’t want another copilot.  I don’t want anybody in my head but you.”

Yancy’s hand finds the back of his neck, steadying.  “You c—could stay a Ranger, kid.”  It’s so hard to force the words out this time he almost gives up.

“Not without you,” Raleigh says stubbornly, and Yancy sighs.

“Raleigh—”

“No,” Raleigh says, not looking at him.

Yancy pulls his head sideways so he can wrap his arm around his brother’s shoulders. “It’s gonna be fine, kid. We’re gonna—gonna be okay.”

Raleigh doesn’t say anything.  It’s not his strange silence this time, though, just him not having anything to say. Yancy can tell, because he doesn't need to drift with his brother to know him that well.

Pentecost exits the room and gives them a glance before he walks away down the hall.

Yancy nods at him as he passes.  Raleigh doesn’t move.

* * *

 

When they finally clear him for the prosthetic with the hip straps, putting it on is the worst part because it involves a person he’s not having sex with getting way too close and personal with his genitals, but the moment after they stand him up makes it worth it.  The angle he stands at has changed, with the spinal injury and how he’s gotten used to walking with the crutches, so his balance is fucked, but it’s still _standing_.

He chokes up when they talk him through taking his first step, even though he almost keels over, and asks his physical therapist to turn away so he can get his shit together before she keeps watching him try to walk.  The metal leg is clunky-looking and it doesn’t really bend the way he wants it to, at first.

But it’s getting better.  It’s getting better.

He hadn’t realized how much he likes being able to put on a pair of pants without pinning one of the legs up until he gets to do it again. When he puts them on—has to wear a belt for his old ones, because he’s lost weight—and wears boots, he almost looks normal.  Tilts a little to one side because of the spinal work, and his right arm, where it’s exposed, shows his graft scars.  He’s too thin. Hair’s a little too long. Missing his muscle tone.

But he looks like himself again, as long as he’s just standing still, not like the cripple who’s been stumping around on crutches for weeks.

When he voices this thought to his therapist she sighs and explains to him, probably for the hundredth time, that he’s himself no matter how he looks. That looking “normal” doesn’t make him worth something more than he is when he doesn’t, that “normal” isn’t real anyway.  Privately, he understands the sentiment, but it doesn’t really make him feel less useless.  It strikes him as a bunch of touchy-feely bullshit, actually.

When he tells her _that_ , she asks him if it’s possible he’s saying that so he doesn’t have to accept it.  “That’s t—too existential for me, Doc,” he answers, trying to smile.

She scribbles a note into her book, sighing again.


	4. Kodiak Island; September 2020.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alternatively titled: why i should never write herc ever. i'm not really happy with this chapter, i think it might be boring. but i probably shouldn't tell you that

Raleigh gets through thirteen compatibility trials with no match at all—he’s not fighting very well, he keeps looking at Yancy, who is itching to get on the mats with him and struggling with the knowledge that he never can again—before he gives up.

Raleigh—Raleigh’s not like him, in a lot of ways, but one of them is this: Yancy will keep hammering away at something even if he doesn’t see any results, unless someone gives him another way to do it or until it works, and Raleigh just isn’t like that.  It’s why Yancy’s recovery is relatively going pretty well and also why his brother throws his staff away and stalks off the mats about an hour and a half in, right up to the Marshal, and says, “I quit.”

Half an hour later he’s got himself a dishonourable discharge and a tongue-lashing and is clinging to Yancy’s shirt so tight Yancy has to put an arm around him and lean back against the wall to keep from falling over, because his balance is still just that shitty.  Raleigh’s not crying, but Yancy can feel against the side of his neck that his jaw is clenched so hard he’s probably going to crack a tooth.

They’re alone in the back hallway, or Raleigh wouldn’t be letting himself do this, so Yancy kisses the top of his head like he hasn’t for years and says, “’s gonna be fine, kiddo.  I got you.”

Part of him is furious at Raleigh for giving up his opportunity like that. But Raleigh definitely doesn’t need to hear that right now, so he stores the fight that will surely ensue when he says it for another day.

“I fucked up, Yance,” Raleigh says, voice muffled and shaky.  “I fucked up.”

* * *

 

Yancy almost quits, too.  Just on principle. Because he told Raleigh a long time ago he was never leaving and he’s not about to break that promise now. But Raleigh doesn’t have a job—and even though Yancy knows that he has four years of almost untouched salary and could probably get an okay job just by snapping his fingers, even with the dishonourable part of his discharge from the PPDC, the part of him that spent two and a half years scrabbling to take care of his little brother says he can’t leave them without a support like that.

So when Pentecost offers him the admin post officially, not looking particularly hopeful about his chances of getting an affirmative answer, he says yes. Then he asks, “May I live off—off of the Academy grounds, sir?”

Pentecost looks like he can see straight through the admittedly transparent request. “I’ll consider it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The consideration is resolved a few days later, when medical finally releases him for duty. His pain is still averaging a three or a four most of the time, worse in the mornings and after too much effort and sometimes just because, so he’s got a little bottle of painkillers on him most of the time.  He still has all three flavours of therapy mandated and he still can’t walk for very long without having to sit down.   His speech has improved, but a lot of the time he still struggles to finish sentences or words.  His gait is odd, halfway between limping and hobbling, and he still uses the crutches a lot of the time even with the prosthetic, because it takes some energy to use the thing and he runs out of that, sometimes.  Still, still, still.  The request comes through, though.  Like he sort of knew it would.

So he and Raleigh get a tiny house on Kodiak Island, partially because Yancy still needs help getting around sometimes and partially because they haven’t lived apart in their lives and neither of them really fancies starting now.  They’re maybe an hour hop on one of the faster planes to Anchorage—so it’s not like they’re exactly on unfamiliar ground.

“You c—could go to school,” he says to Raleigh, during dinner the night before he goes into the Academy for the first time as its administrator. “We’ve got the money now, not that—not that anywhere wouldn’t give you a full ride.”

“Nah,” Raleigh says.  And that’s all he says. He hasn’t been real talkative since his discharge, even with Yancy. Yancy’s kind of worried about it, actually, but Raleigh, no longer a member of the PPDC, is no longer seeing his therapist.

“You gonna look for a job, then?”

“Yeah. Don’t know what I want to do.”

“Shoot high, kid.  You’ve got some leeway t—to mess around this time.”

Raleigh smiles a little into his food.  But it’s not really _his_ smile. Yancy gets up—a process which now involves no small amount of arm strength—and teeters for a moment before he uses the table edge to balance himself and crosses over to stick his hand in his brother’s hair and mess it up.  “ _Yance_.”

He sounds exactly how he used to when they were younger and Yancy pulled this shit. Just a _little_ bit whiny. Yancy finds it impossible not to grin, although it’s crooked—it’s usually crooked now, because the muscles of and around his mouth won’t really listen to him all the time— “ _Raleigh_ ,” he mocks.

Raleigh smacks him.  He almost falls over, but retains his upright status by grabbing the table edge again. “Sorry,” his brother says, hands having shot out to catch him the moment he’d started falling.

“’s fine,” Yancy replies, and it is.  It’s better than Raleigh walking on eggshells around him, which people still do when they see him walking.  “G—give me your resumé when you write it and I’ll look it over.”

“Thanks, Yancy.”

Sometimes Yancy thinks part of him got stuck in Raleigh’s head when he fell out of the Drift, because Raleigh sometimes gets all polite now, which was never really either of their things, but it was definitely more his than his brother’s.

It would explain a lot, probably.

The next morning  his first order of business is getting on the phone with Hercules Hansen—the time difference is a ridiculous twenty hours, so he spends a couple of hours figuring out how to get around the Academy without the ability to climb stairs, a problem he’d never had when he was here learning.  The call is scheduled for noon his time, and he’d really like to be asleep, truthfully—but that’s more an old habit, the pain is doing a better job of waking him up on time and keeping him up than Raleigh ever did.

He guesses it only took breaking half the shit in his body to achieve what his brother has been trying to do for five years.

When the call time swings around, the image on the screen is clear: Herc looks like he wants to kill something, a little bit.  His jaw is rough with stubble and he’s holding a cup of coffee, which, by the way, is another thing Yancy misses, being able to carry one of those around.  He’s too much of a spill danger now to make it worth the risk.  “Hey, sir.  You look a litt—little homicidal this morning.”

Herc snorts into his coffee.  “Just my damn kid.”

“What happened?”

Onscreen, one blunt-fingered hand waves the curiosity away.  “Always fucking shut up in this room whenever I’m not in the conn-pod or the Kwoon. Thank god you’re taking this shit.”

Yancy raises his eyebrows.  “Uh—”

“First things first, you’re about to hate every instructor you’ve got. The whole lot of them aren’t useless, but they’re impossible to hold meetings with.  And trying to organize the active Ranger teaching duties is a pain in the arse and a half.”  Herc’s tone makes it obvious that this is not a complaint, but rather a warning. “There’s some bureaucratic shit I know you hate as much as me—you’ll be seeing a hell of a lot of Stacker.  Oh, and you have press duties.”

Yancy groans.  “I’m st—starting to think this assignment was a punishment.”

“That’s what I said when I started covering it.”  Herc sighs.  “But don’t worry too much about it, Becket.  You’ll do a better job than me.”

“Yancy,” Yancy corrects him, leftover from five years of military people calling “Becket” and getting both of them.  “And since this place hasn’t imploded, I think you’ve done a pretty—pretty respectable job.”

“Yeah, but the Marshal didn’t just assign you there for shits and giggles, mate. I was a choice of necessity after the last bloke bit it, but he could have put you anywhere but back in the cockpit.” Yancy doesn’t respond to that, trying to follow the logic of it.  Herc apparently doesn’t have the patience to wait for him.  “He wanted you there for a reason.  You good with kids, Yancy?”

Is he ever, after years as primary caregiver.

Herc takes a look at his face and barks out about half of a laugh. “See?  All you’re going to be dealing with is kids. Some’re gonna be older than you, but they’re all idiots in their own ways until you beat it out of them.”

Yancy gets the idea he got very lucky never having Hercules Hansen assigned to him as an instructor.  Or maybe very unlucky. He’s not sure. “G—great.”

“I know it’s not your fault,” Herc says, and Yancy sighs, waiting for the inevitable commentary, “but you want to work on that stammer, or the little brats will make fun of you.”

He grits his teeth against saying something rude, because even with that first inoffensive rider on it and the knowledge that it’s true, he hates being reminded of his voice. “It’s a lot better than it was a few—few months back, but yeah.  I’m working on it.”

“Sorry ‘bout that.  It was an impressive kill for your brother, though, one-pilot takedown.”

“Yeah,” Yancy says, surprised that Herc’s talking about it, because usually people take one look at him with his weird walk and his tilted body and stutter and assume he can’t deal with the mention of the accident.  “’m proud of him.”

“Yeah,” Herc repeats, then puts down his cup.  “All right, enough chitchat.”

Yancy was not aware that most of this had been chitchat.  He keeps the laugh that almost bubbles to the surface firmly off of his face.  “Right, sir.”

“Herc,” Herc corrects him.  “Or Ranger Hansen, if you’ve really got a stick up your arse about rank.  Anyway, let’s get started.”

He proceeds to outline Yancy’s responsibilities, which are about a mile long—Yancy knows why he’s happy to get this off his shoulders, now, especially if he’s doubling it with admin duties in Sydney and staying up to condition as a pilot. “Now,” he finishes, while Yancy is still taking notes.  “Job’s not without perks. Well, not for you, anyway.”

“Good to know, sir.”

“You’re never going to knock that off, are you?”

“Probably not.”

“Well, take a jab at it.  You’re going to have to talk to me more than you’d like to, you might as well get used to me.” He picks his coffee mug up again—it says “Fuck Off” on the side, and Yancy barely holds back on laughter—and continues, “Anyway, you get to teach a class every semester except this one, because the vacancies are all filled at the moment.  Know you took one in 2019 as a visiting Ranger, because my kid had you, but I don’t think you’re up for combat again.  You pretty much pick up whatever you can’t get instructors for.”

“That’s a perk?”

“I’d believe you when you sound skeptical about that if I weren’t holding your file. Says you were doing unofficial tutoring sessions when you were in for 2016 and I have about a year’s worth of memories from Chuck floating around in my head that say you looked like you were enjoying yourself when you were visiting.”

Yancy grins at him, and Herc flashes him a brief smile back.  It looks a lot like the smile people give Raleigh when he’s at his most contagiously happy.  “All right, you c—caught me,” he concedes.  “I like teaching.”

“Well, you get to.  And you get to assess compatibility trials in the spring, which you need to be trained for, by the way. I’ll be doing that when I fly up around then if Stacker doesn’t get to you first.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“Yeah, they’re fun.”

“I’ll take—take your word for it.”

“Right you will.”  Herc waves the _Fuck Off_ mug vaguely in the air. When he notices Yancy conspicuously not looking at it, he says, “Birthday present from the kid a couple of years back.  Not sure if he meant it as a commentary on my mood or a message. Got any questions?”

“Any existing problems I should know about?”

“None I haven’t told you about.  Actually, watch out for your tech chief.  She’s a shrew who can’t solve a problem by herself."

Yancy misses Tendo.  “Wonderful.”

“Oh, and Stacker’s kid is in right now.  Not that you should treat her any different, but he’ll probably ask you how she’s progressing every time he talks to you, so you better know when the question comes up, yeah?”

Yancy nods, and Herc raises his mug like a toast.  “She’s all yours, mate.  Try not to cock it up too badly.”

“Yes, sir,” Yancy says.  “Thank you, sir.”

“Fuck’s sake, Yancy. ”

“Sorry, sir.”

Herc rolls his eyes.  “Shoot me a message if you have any problems.”

“Absolutely, sir.”

“Dick,” Herc says, and the screen winks out.

Yancy finally laughs.

Then he goes downstairs, with the help of an elevator at the end of the hall—optimistically, he leaves his crutches behind—to eat lunch with whoever’s still there before the mess hall closes serving until 1800.  He’s learned by now that—as unsteady as his walk is—it’s a bad idea to get anything that could possibly spill, even if he’s only walking a short distance with it, so he doesn’t.  He passes over the table full of techs in the corner to nudge a Ranger cadet with his elbow to get him to budge over on the bench so he doesn’t have to try to pretend he can sit down in the middle of it without breaking his spine again.

Silence reigns at the table full of students for a minute.  This was what happened the first time he did this when he was a teacher, too, so it doesn’t faze him.

“Hey, kids,” he says, mercifully stutter-free.  They look a little shell-shocked—or awed, he can’t tell, but his ego is hoping it’s the latter—as he starts eating his sandwich.

The table is silent for a moment.  Then someone says, “Hey, Ranger Becket,” and the hello travels around the table.

He doesn’t correct the title, although he knows he should.  The part of him that loved the excitement and the prestige and how everything used to be doesn’t want to cop to how it’s all gone. Instead, he raises a hand and salutes them with two fingers from the forehead, a gesture Raleigh has taken to calling _The Lazy Man’s Homage to the Military_.

“Good to see you’ve recovered,” says a girl whose accent places her as Italian.

“Yep,” Yancy says.  “Technology these days, wow.” He pauses, then raises one eyebrow.   “You all can start eating again, I don’t bite.  T—talk amongst yourselves.”

There’s the damned stammer again.  He waits for the blowback, for the laugh, but it doesn’t come.  The table continues to be silent for a moment, then three of them start eating at once, with the air of people obeying orders, and one boy at the end of the table says, loudly, “So!”

So he laughs instead.

And they join in.

* * *

 

“Becket the elder!”  Tendo says when he calls that night.  “How was your first day?” Yancy shoves Raleigh’s feet off his lap for the third time and turns sideways to lie against the couch so his brother isn’t in the frame when he replies.

“Cool. Never n—noticed when we were there before how many fucking stairs that b—building has, though.”

“You get around okay?”

“Have to use crutches for the ramp outside my office unless I want to crawl it,” Yancy says, a lesson he learned the hard way coming back from lunch. “Can—can get down it okay, but not up. But other’n that, yeah.”

Raleigh’s feet are back on his right leg, since he’s turned so he can’t put them on his lap.  Yancy has not been so conscious of the fact that his brother is fully capable of being the _annoying little brother_ in a long time. He swats at Raleigh’s ankle. “Talked to Herc Hansen for the first time since Manila.  Still c—can’t bring myself to use his first name.  Fucking— _Hercules_.”

“Your name is _Yancy_ ,” Tendo points out.

“Yancy is a perfectly normal name,” Raleigh says from the other end of the couch.

“ _Your_ name is Raleigh.”

“And—and you’re Tendo.  Now that we—we’ve all introduced ourselves—”

“You boys should come visit this weekend.”

Yancy glances at Raleigh, who is now staring intently at his book. He’s pretty sure the kid isn’t planning on stepping foot in the Anchorage Shatterdome again for a long time, and he’s not going to push him on that one.  “B—been there, done that.  But we’ll be here wh—whenever you want us if you want to come see the new place.  Bring your girlfriend and—and we might even consider going out with you.”

He still can’t drink, what with the fact that his liver is functioning on the lowest possible efficiency settings right now, and he can’t be the designated driver, because his muscle control is too faulty to let him drive safely.

But Raleigh perks up a little.

And that’s all that matters.


	5. Kodiak Island; March-September 2021

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in which everybody cries, i shoehorn characters into situations that will be awkward for them on purpose, resulting in probably some out of character parts, and i still can't write.
> 
> also, i guesstimated on the chapters and fucked up. there will actually be ten, i think. i'm already mostly done with the next one--4, this chapter, 6, and 7 were originally going to be all two chapters, but, uh, they ran away from me, so nope.

The anniversary of Knifehead comes and passes.  Yancy wouldn't even notice it, except that Raleigh does, and can't look at him all day.

He does see a lot of Herc.  Sees a lot of Stacker Pentecost, too.  The man stays at the Academy for a couple of months in February and March, acting as Fightmaster and Assault Specialist in turns—Yancy would ordinarily call it favouritism towards his daughter that he spends so much time with them, but he never goes anything less than brutally on her.

And it makes her _incredible_. He’s sitting in the tech room when she bags her thirty-first kill out of thirty-one sim drops, and it’s all he can do to keep his jaw from hanging open.  “Fucking brilliant,” Herc comments from behind his left shoulder, watching the sim on the screen.  He’s there for the compatibility trials, which are finishing soon.  “Trained her up real good.”

“I had nothing to do with this,” Pentecost says, and although he’s exceptional at keeping his poker face when he wants to, Yancy can hear the pride in his voice. “This was all Miss Mori.”

Yancy tries telling Raleigh about her, because seriously, the previous drop/kill record, held by Chuck Hansen, had been 47/28, but Raleigh has been pulling into himself even more, recently, and he doesn’t respond.

With the perceptiveness that comes with working part-time in the kid’s head for five years, Yancy surmises that he’s feeling a little lost.

And for the first time in his life, he doesn't know how to solve Raleigh's problems.

* * *

 

His first trimester teaching, in October of 2021, he heads a class on military discipline.  And takes great joy in frightening the shit out of the lot of them.  About the only time he never has trouble with his mouth is when he’s speaking French or when he’s yelling—why, no one can explain to him, but that last bit makes it easy for him to sit in front of a class of sixty newbies, maybe twenty of whom will pass Stage One, if they’re lucky, and call out the words, “ _Two_ of you will make it to Rangers.  If you’re _lucky_ —you do the math on that one, Cadets,” with a smile.

The Academy doesn’t believe in holding back.  They don’t believe in accepting anything less than a hundred percent from any of the cadets.  When you’re fucking with kaiju, only the best will do.  So the training is aimed to be rough and mean and nothing short of ruthless. To weed out the ones who don’t have the determination or the balls to make it through.  And so the washouts start on the third day of training, approximately.

The first kid to quit lands in his office on the morning of day three, practically shivering with fear as Yancy calls him in.  He’s a tall, weedy kid, probably a year or so younger than Raleigh, with an angular, too-thin face and eyes too large to sit in it.  “What is it, Cadet?”

“S—sir,” the kid—Aditya Gulati, he thinks, if he remembers right from the files—stammers, and Yancy almost laughs, because that’s usually his line, but instead he glances at the fistful of paper he’s holding and reads the withdrawal heading at the top and sighs.

“Come in, kid.”  His voice softens. They don’t have to come directly to him to leave, just turn in the paperwork, which he’d handed a copy of to all of them the first day at orientation.  But he’d made the request, and he appreciates that Gulati is honouring it, because he suspects most of his counterparts won't.

The eyes staring back at him are confused.  Yancy holds out a hand and beckons, pointing to the chair in front of his desk. “C’mon.  I only b—bite when you ask politely.”  This isn’t his first time having trouble with his words in front of any of the cadets, but it’s the first time not challenging them with his eyes to say something about it.

Gulati leaves the office much calmer, with a plane ticket home and his hair slightly mussed from where Yancy had forgotten that Raleigh is the only one who puts up with him when he’s in caring mode.

 

Once every two weeks, they fly him back to the Icebox for all of his various therapies. Raleigh doesn’t come, and he tries not to think too hard about that.

The physical therapist is pretty happy with him, usually, gives him a new set of exercises, a pat on the back, and sends him on his way.  The speech therapist makes him stumble through tongue-twisters and repeating words with sharp consonant sounds over and over again. “Can’t can’t cant” gets depressing, which he tells the doctor jokingly, but he takes it very seriously and switches immediately to “tattle tattle tattle” and less negative sounds.

It’s embarrassing even after over a year of doing it.  But it’s helping, so he’ll deal with it.

His least favourite appointment is still the shrink.  But he puts up with these, too, mostly because at the end he can ask her about Raleigh and she’ll give him some advice, always with the warning that it’s off the record.

She insists on talking about his scarring, about his leg.  About his voice.  About how he _feels_ about how he is, now.

Before Knifehead, Yancy had had no use for lack of self-esteem.  It wasn’t arrogance, wasn’t necessarily feeling assured of being attractive.  He’d always known he was capable.  Always known he had a _purpose_.  He still has a purpose, but it’s hard to keep from feeling like he might not be able to fulfill it, these days.

Ranger Yancy Becket, Gipsy Danger’s right pilot, had been a known playboy, easily charming. Always had been, in fact—even at his most stressed before the Academy he’d been able to manage a smile and a quip. Captain Yancy Becket, the Jaeger Academy's administrative head, has kept some of the charm, but it’s not half so effortless, and he hasn’t even tried to kiss a girl since Gipsy went down.

He really wishes they could stop talking about that.

Every time he’s in Anchorage he visits Tendo.  When he complains about how every therapy session eventually turns into a talk about how he’s not getting any, Tendo turns around in his chair and raises his eyebrows. “Then we’re going get you laid, my man.”

Yancy, who is stretched out on the bed with a book that he’s not really reading, snorts. “No, thanks.”

“That’s not the Yancy Becket I know and love.”

“The Yancy Becket you knew and loved d—didn’t look like Jaws chewed him up and spit him out,” Yancy says sourly, opening his book to effectively end the conversation. He would never say that to the therapist.  Hell, he’d never say it to Raleigh, because Raleigh would get that guilty look on his face that means he’s thinking about the words _You know what I’m thinking_. But Tendo just raises his eyebrow.

“Man, I’ve seen your scars.  They’re not that bad.”

Yancy is tempted to ignore him, but that’s a thing Raleigh does that drives him insane, so instead he lowers his book again and levels his friend with a look. “I was literally torn—torn open and put back together.  They’re exactly that b—bad.  I would know, I get to look at them in a mirror every day.”

It kind of feels good to say it to someone this bluntly.

Tendo just shakes his head, then pulls out his phone, starts tapping away at it. Yancy watches him for a minute, waiting for his reaction. Feeling confrontational.  Even though it’s never, ever been his style to argue a point like this.  He doesn’t even _want_ to argue it. He’s just sick of everyone trying to be cheery and upbeat about the fact that his body is ruined. Sick of being told _you can do it_ and _you’re special and beautiful and whatever other shit we want to shovel down your throat today_ , sick of always having to be cheery and upbeat about it himself, even when he doesn’t feel optimistic at all.

Some days it feels like he’s ramming his head into a brick wall and a lot of the time he has no idea why.

“What are you doing?” he asks, finally.

“Asking Alison to come over.”

“What?”

“You heard me, pretty boy.”

Yancy sighs. “Okay, then, _why_?”

“To help me blow your mind, if you want.  To play a card game, if you don’t.”

If Tendo were anyone else, Yancy might have stood up and clocked him. Instead he just grits his teeth and growls, “I d—don’t—don’t n—need _a p—pity fuck_.”

It’s the most garbled his speech has been in a long time.  He’s trying to spit the words, but they just tangle on the way out of his throat.

Tendo just looks at him like he’s come to some totally unfathomable conclusion. “Becket, I don’t _do_ pity fucks.”

Yancy raises his voice, which probably means he can be heard in the quarters next door, but it also means he doesn’t fucking stammer.  “Fucking someone who can’t even move his hips right for it because he made the _mistake_ of telling you he hadn’t gotten any in over a year is the _definition_ of a pity fuck.”

“No, it’s not,” Tendo says drily.  “The definition of a pity fuck is me only sleeping with you because I feel bad for you, and I don’t.  I think you’re being an idiot, actually.”

“So what, y—you’re offering me a threesome out of the goodness of your heart?”

“No, I’m offering you a threesome because I think it’d be fun.  I’m not exactly martyring myself on a cross here; I think you’re hot.  Both of us do.”

Yancy only barely refrains from snorting again, from saying _what, do you both have some sort of amputee kink_ , but he bites down on it, because he’s really not feeling the pep talk he's sure would result right now.  Instead he swallows his words and just stays silent.  He’s not doing that thing that Raleigh does, this time. He just doesn’t know what to say.

Tendo looks at him and it looks the way it feels when he looks at Raleigh sometimes and thinks, _poor kid_.  “Yancy.”

“ _What_?”  His voice sounds brittle even to him.

“You don’t want to, we don’t.  I could have timed this better.”

He can’t get any words out for almost a minute.  “Not tonight,” he says finally, quiet.

Tendo gets up and sits down on the foot of the bed, leaning against the wall. “I’m sorry.”

It’s the most serious Yancy’s ever seen him, and Yancy’s heard him screaming into a microphone about an approaching kaiju.  “Nah,” he says, reaching out with one hand to pluck at one of Tendo’s stupid suspenders again.  “It’s fine.”

Tendo just looks at him for a minute, rolls his eyes.  “You know, you’ve only got one little brother.  You don’t have to be that for the rest of us.”

Yancy laughs, softly, and then he’s crying for the first time in nearly six months.  He doesn’t know why, but he can’t turn it off.  He swings his legs off the bed to face away, to hide. The book falls to the side.

“Aw, fuck,” Tendo says.  “I’m sorry. You want me to go for a little while?”

“Yeah,” Yancy says, woodenly.  “Yeah.”

 

On the flight home, he stares out the window soundlessly, doesn’t bother, for once, trying to make conversation with the pilot.  “Captain,” the woman says, an hour and a half after takeoff, and his head jerks up.  “We’re back.”

When he gets home, Raleigh doesn’t say anything past “hello”.

Tendo’s right.  He can’t really be everyone’s older brother.  But he doesn’t know how to stop being Raleigh’s, and he’s been dropping the ball on that one, recently, so he falls onto the foot of Raleigh’s bed that night and says, “Hey, kid.”

“Yeah?”

“You need t—to talk to somebody.  Me, if you want. But you can’t just k—keep doing this.” He gestures between them. “Okay?”

Raleigh looks at him, absolutely soundless, for a long time.  And Yancy just keeps his eyes on him and waits. He’s got time. Finally, his brother says, “Okay.”

“You want me to see if one of the psychs at the Academy will see you?”

“No,” Raleigh says, and doesn’t say anything else for a minute. Then, “I hate therapy.”

Yancy reaches out to flick his shoulder.  “Me too. What d’you say I pull out a bottle of wine and we play t—truth or dare with no dare?”

Raleigh laughs.

It’s the best thing he’s heard in a while.

“You’re such a dork.  And you can’t drink.”

“Fine, Miss Two-shoes,” Yancy tells him, even though he’d had no intention of drinking, rolling his eyes.  “I’ll leave the wine to you and g—get apple juice or some shit.”

A few hours later Raleigh can’t stop giggling and Yancy is probably going to be tasting apples until he dies.  But Raleigh’s probably said more words collectively in the past five minutes than he has for the past five weeks.  “’m sorry about your leg, Yance,” he says, leaning against Yancy's shoulder, voice slurred—not with alcohol, but with imminent sleep.  Yancy knows him well enough to know heavy reds are one of the few things that pretty reliably knock him out, even if it does take a while.

“Me too, kid,” he says.  “Sucks not being able to run.”

“I’d miss dancing,” Raleigh comments, sounding contemplative, although Yancy knows the last time his brother was out dancing was before Knifehead, so in a way, they’re both missing out on that one.  “Do you?”

“Yeah,” Yancy replies, feeling as if he’s hearing himself speak from very far away. “Yeah, I do.”

“I miss drifting,” Raleigh says, head lolling now.  “Don’t know what you’re thinking anymore. Your face doesn’t move the way it used to. I can’t read you as well. Don’t really like being one person.”

The face—that’s his injuries, keeping him from expressing himself the same way he’d used to, but the last part is true.

The Drift is something else, when you’re with someone you’re compatible with. There’s nothing like it. He and Raleigh have been close as long as he can remember, but never in the same way that the Drift allows for. Yancy’s always held a few things back from it, out of necessity, because there are some things Raleigh just doesn’t need to see, and he’s always quashed certain memories when they arise in either of their minds, but his brother always goes in full, like he’s afraid of nothing, throws his everything into the stream.

And that—god, that.  It’s amazing to throw yourself into something like that.

Yancy misses it too.

“Ask me what I’m thinking, k—kid.  I’ll tell you.”

“’s’not the same.”

No. It’s not.

“I’m not good as one person,” Raleigh says, after Yancy’s been quiet for a moment. “I’m not anything.”

Yancy has let him think this too long.  Not that Raleigh’s ever said it before, but he ought to have _known_. “Listen to me,” he says, and the verbal similarity to Knifehead isn’t deliberate, he realizes it only after the fact, but Raleigh doesn’t wince, so maybe he hadn’t noticed. “ _Fuck_ that.  You’re the b—best person I’ve ever met.  Being a pilot was just a thing you—you did for a while, it’s not the only thing you’re ever going to do.”

Raleigh was his whole _world_ for almost three years.

Raleigh is laughing into his shoulder.

Yancy _thinks_ he’s laughing, anyway, but he doesn’t stop, just keeps going, until Yancy uses some of the core strength he’s been working on to lower the two of them down to the mattress, because the way Raleigh’s wrapped around his side, there’s no separating them just yet. He hangs onto Yancy for a while, still laughing, and then, gradually, his grip loosens and his breathing evens.

He’s asleep.

Yancy hasn’t really seen Raleigh asleep for any extended period of time for years, so he just sits there and watches, for a while.  It’s probably creepy, but asleep Raleigh loses years of age Yancy hadn’t even realized he’d been carrying around.

With his eyes closed he could pass for a teenager.

Twenty-one—twenty-two now, he supposes, is pretty young to lose something that made you as happy as Gipsy made Raleigh.

He extricates himself from his brother and starts cleaning up the room, careful to remove his prosthetic first so the noise of it thumping against the floor doesn’t wake Raleigh up.  This means he has to drag himself around the room a little, a funny hopping crawl, trying to be as silent as possible, but he’ll take it, even though it hurts like bejesus and probably looks ridiculous.

He pops three painkillers when he’s done, sitting in his own bed, and he’s out.

* * *

 

On their weekly call the next week, after he’s finished reporting in, the Marshal says, “You may or may not be aware, but your injuries at Knifehead have jumpstarted the world of prosthetic technology for the first time since K-Day.”

Yancy doesn’t really follow the world of prosthetic technology. He probably should, but— “Yeah?”

“As it happens, three of the PPDC’s own engineers have collaborated on a prototype loosely based off of Jaeger technology, which has just come into the testing phase.”  Pentecost raises his eyebrows, a cue Yancy really didn’t need to get the point.  “You’re the inspiration for their work, and therefore their first choice of subject, Mr. Becket, but the fitting process and monitoring is somewhat time-consuming.  So I propose that one of them stay on as an instructor for your next trimester to monitor it, should that be something you agree to.”

When Yancy makes a considering face, the Marshal continues, “I’ve seen the plans and prototypes myself.  It would be a distinct upgrade.”

“Can’t hurt,” Yancy replies after a few moments.

“Then I’ll make arrangements for the flight.  Expect its arrival at 0900 tomorrow.”

When Mako Mori steps out of the plane at 0859, he isn’t even slightly surprised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also: more mako mori in chapters 6 and 8-10


	6. Kodiak Island; October 2021-March 2022

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter's pretty happy. i'd like to thank the academy
> 
> also, i went ahead and made this into a series with the other yancy becket thing i did because why not

“The technology is based off the same concept as the Jaegers,” Mako explains to him a week before classes start, sitting in his office.  “So that the muscles and tendons respond to the nervous impulses of the user.  This prototype closely resembles Striker Eureka, the Australian Mark V., piloted by the Hansens.”

This is so many more words than she ever used with him six months ago, when she was a cadet.  He suspects, from how quickly she says them and how she provides the information on Striker, which she must know he knows, that they were a pitch speech for someone else, rehearsed more than once.

“The ‘neural bridge’, in this case, is between the nerve cells in the remainder of your leg and the nodes of the prosthetic,” she continues. “Initial attachment will require a short and non-invasive medical procedure and some recovery time, but following that the model will be removable.  It harnesses at the right shoulder, across the hips, and at the wound site. It will be somewhat more complicated than your current model,” she apologizes, “but theoretically you will be able to move it as you do your right leg.”

“Sounds cool.”  He’s not sure how he feels about the _medical procedure_ part, but she looks so enthusiastic that he doesn’t fight it.

“There—there may be some neural load.”

 _Oh, good_ , he thinks, as she says “may”, remembering that she is eighteen years old and as smart as she is, he probably should not be letting her bright ideas into the stump of his leg, which is really fucked up enough already.

“Not,” she assures him hurriedly, as she’s waiting for him to shut her down, “to the degree of true Jaeger technology, but I would not wear it for longer than eight hours per day, especially with your past history of stroke.”

“Duly noted, Miss Mori.”  He almost slips. Almost calls her “cadet”.

Her smile is so brief he almost misses it—she ducks her head the moment it appears—but it’s there for a moment, brilliant and proud and excited, and honestly, that’s pretty much exactly the look he wants out of any of the kids who pass his program.

So he signs the consent forms.

* * *

 

The procedure takes about two hours at most, but he has a month before he’s allowed to put pressure on the site, so he has a month where he can’t use either prosthetic, has to go back to the crutches if he’s upright and a wheelchair if he tires out.  The techs get used to him bouncing around everywhere, falling into walls and having trouble sitting down, and Raleigh has to start helping him get into the shower again, which neither of them likes.

He has to shout the new cadets into submission while sitting on the table at the front of the room instead of stumping around on his feet.

Foot. _Whatever_.

The prosthetic really does look like a Jaeger leg, just much smaller, and the foot is less square—it’s clearly shaped to fit in a shoe.  Mako lets the doctor help him attach it when the time comes to try it out, for which he is profoundly grateful, because he _likes_ her and she’s _eighteen_ and _Pentecost’s daughter_ and it would be _weird_ having her face that close to his dick.  He fumbles through putting his boxers on before he lets her come in to start adjusting the thing—it’s heavy, he knows now why there’s a shoulder strap too—and she opens the side of it and curls up on the floor to start tinkering.

Three hours later they’re still sitting in the room.  “Try to raise your foot, please, Captain Becket,” she asks for what must be the fifteenth time.

“Maybe it’s me, not the—the leg,” he sighs, when the foot still doesn’t move. Maybe he’s forgotten how to move a leg in the time he’s spent not having one.

“No,” she says, sounding peevish, and he fights back a laugh, because with that mild frustration in her voice she sounds just like Raleigh when he’s in one of his stubborn moods.  “Try to move your foot, Captain,” she repeats a few minutes later.

She doesn’t say “raise” it this time, so he tries to swing it side to side.

And his heart stops.

Because it _moves_.

“Holy shit,” he breathes, and her face lights up.  He has to swallow around a lump in his throat.

“Try a rotation,” she orders, forgetting herself—she’s been careful, up ‘til now, to be quiet and listen to him.

He does. It only moves side to side, not up and down.  But it’s moving. “If the Marshal wouldn’t end my life,” he promises, repeating the motion, “I would kiss you.”

Her cheeks colour slightly, but he hardly notices, too engrossed in the fact that he is _moving his foot_.  “With all due respect, Captain Becket, if you kissed me you would not have to wait for the Marshal.”

Yancy looks up at her and instead of pointing out that it’s not exactly an achievement to take down a guy with only one leg, remembers her simulator score. “Yes, ma’am.”

She bends her head to study the wiring again, frowning, then makes a “hmm” noise and opens the metal plate over his shin.  “Oh,” she murmurs, although this is not the first time she’s looked at this. She reaches in with a small plastic rod, which she’s been using to move around the wires, and separates two metal cords that are right next to each other.  When she takes it out, they spring back together, so she sticks it back in and leaves it in, leaving the shin plate off of the front. “Try moving your foot upwards now.”

He does. The cords slide by each other around the probe. It works.  “That’s fucking amazing,” he says.

Mako flashes him that smile again, like she can’t keep it down just yet.

The part of him that’s always trying to be an older brother, even when Raleigh’s nowhere in sight, wants to tell her it’s okay to smile at him, that he doesn’t mind, that he doesn’t think it’s impolite, but he reins in the urge.

Then she glances over his shoulder and straightens.  “Detach this and leave it here, please.”  She taps it as she gets up to leave.  “I will fix the ankle joint later and tomorrow we can work on the knee joint calibration.”

Yancy glances back over his shoulder, too—a process which involves him turning on the chair, because he can’t really twist his back around very well anymore. Ah, the clock. “Oh, shit.  I have t—to be at a strategy class in five minutes.”

Mako has to get to one of the LOCCENT track mechanics classes in five minutes too, but she, unlike him, can run.

She doesn’t. She waits for him outside the door, at attention, as he unstraps her miracle from his body and gets his crutches back.  “Go,” he says, when he opens the door to hop out of the room and sees her still there. He’ll just slow her down if she walks with him.

She doesn’t need to be told twice, she’s off like a shot, holding her papers to her chest and taking off.  She runs like she fights, quick and controlled, and the part of him that’s eight years older than her and feels ancient with his shitty, broken-up body is endeared by the youthful quality of her patent eagerness.

Once he's done grinning at her retreating back, he goes to his class.  He’s five minutes late, and the cadets are starting to get restless the way they do when an instructor isn’t with them at all times. “Don’t get t—too excited, kids,” he says as he almost trips across the doorjamb.  “I’m here.”

Some asshole in the back groans.  Yancy only has to raise an eyebrow in that general direction to cut off the sound.

 

A week later he’s learning to stand up.

A week after that he’s trying to walk.  He falls over the first time, because the balance is different than the balance on the simpler prosthetic, and Mako is smart enough—her at seven inches shorter than him and probably at least sixty pounds lighter, not even counting the prosthetic—not to try and catch him, which means he ends up with a bloody nose and scraped palms and his spine informing him he’s done a stupid thing. “Oh, Jesus,” he rasps thickly, sounding like he’s got a cold as he’s tipping his head back and she’s handing him a tissue.

While he stops bleeding, and is gingerly feeling his nose to make sure it’s not broken, she opens the side of the thing to check the alignments, or something, he has no idea.  “Try to stay upright this time, Mr. Becket,” she instructs him as she’s helping him to his feet.

“See, it’ll—it’ll be different now you’ve said that, because I was t— _trying_ to fuck myself up, before.”

She’s learned not to take him seriously when he starts being sarcastic, by now.

A week after that he’s running.

Raleigh still won’t set foot in the Academy, won’t get anywhere near anything about the Jaeger program, but one of the cadets takes a video and it goes viral, and when his brother watches it he hugs Yancy so tight it sends bolts of pain up his spine.

The video starts when Yancy is halfway through his one lap of the outside track, wearing his uniform and a jacket, because it’s cold in Alaska in December, and ends with him laughing and picking up the girl with the camera and spinning her around, then almost dropping her, which makes her, in turn, _actually_ drop her phone.  The video ends in black, with the camera pointed at the ground, and Yancy’s voice wheezing _Fuck sorry **Jesus** my back hurts oh my god_ and then the sound of more laughter.

Raleigh watches it five times in a row after he’s done apologizing for the hug and Yancy’s done telling him he’ll live while trying to figure out how he can get his painkillers out without making it obvious.

He’s talking more now, Raleigh is.  Not as much as he used to, but for the second time, he’s stopped shutting down every time Yancy mentions something he doesn’t want to talk about.  Yancy doesn’t realize how long it’s been since he’s seen Raleigh smile properly until the kid is replaying that stupid video for the sixth time and turning that grin back on him when the grainy him on the screen gets close to the camera, about to pick up its owner.  “Yancy,” he says, like he doesn’t know another word to say, and he’s still beaming.

“Raleigh,” Yancy tells him, and it’s meant to be mocking, but it doesn’t really turn out that way.

 

At the end of Mako’s eight-week teaching post, he escorts her to the Anchorage Shatterdome because he’s going anyway, for his bimonthly round of appointments. “Hey,” he says to her on the plane.

She looks up from her tablet, which is displaying the specs for Horizon Brave, if he’s not much mistaken about his Jaeger identifications.  He’s not sure why she’s looking at them, since Brave was retired years ago, but he just tries not to argue with her. “Yes, Captain Becket?”

“You want to help me freak out my physical therapist?”

Her eyebrow lifts.  “I do not think that would be wise.”

“D—didn’t lose my leg being wise.”  It’s getting less touchy to joke about it, these days.

“No,” she says, “You did not.”

 _Ouch_ , Yancy thinks, but he doesn’t push it.

He messes with his physical therapist by himself instead, walks into the room concentrating so that his walk is smooth.  It’s the first time he’s used the new prosthetic in front of her, and she looks at him like he’s turned green and sprouted antennae.  “It grew back,” Yancy informs her, and she rolls her eyes at him, coming to the right conclusion finally after a moment of shock.

It’s the sort of thing Raleigh would have laughed at, her face.

 

Chuck Hansen arrives for his visiting Ranger teaching yet another week after that—Yancy’s been wondering ever since Pentecost told him to arrange for the Hansen prodigy to teach a course how the boy wonder had escaped this duty for all twenty-five trimesters since his graduation.

The answer isn’t immediately obvious.  Kid looks different from the last time Yancy saw him, which was probably four years ago for about thirty seconds or something, but he’s also got a little Herc about the face, so Yancy recognizes him easy enough.  He’s perfectly respectful to Yancy, takes his training easily. In fact, he’s probably the most cooperative visiting instructor Yancy’s dealt with other than Mako.

Which, from reports of the kid’s temper, he’s not really expecting.

Yancy’s kind of impressed with him, actually, even after—or perhaps especially after—he makes a man twice his age cry in class—a drivesuit technology class, no less, so he does it without any physical force—but he’s got to admit: Chuck Hansen’s kind of a douchebag.  He’s an efficient douchebag, though, and he knows his shit.  So he’s willing to overlook a thing like that.

Herc calls him the second Wednesday into the trimester, looking grim. “How’s the little fucker doing, then?”

He’s holding the _Fuck Off_ mug again. He always seems to be. Then again, Yancy always calls him in the morning, Sydney time.

Yancy’s on better terms with him than he was a year ago.  He started calling him _Herc_ on the regular a while back.  “Great, actually.  I don’t know what—what you all were worried about.”

Herc doesn’t say anything to indicate he might be surprised about that. Doesn’t even really look surprised, which Yancy supposes makes sense, considering he drifts with Chuck. “He behaving himself?”

 _Once a dad, always a dad_ , Yancy doesn’t say, because the one thing about the two of them that he’s noticed even from his very limited interaction with Hansen, Jr. is that the two of them don’t get along nearly as well as the media would suggest.  “He made a guy cry last week.”

Herc snorts into his mug.  “This is one of those times Stacker would give me that ‘chip off the old block’ look.”

“I can—can see it.”

“Whatever you fucking do, mate, don’t tell him that,” Herc says, and Yancy momentarily wonders if he’s actually drinking coffee or if that’s some sort of corrosive metal-scoring substance he’s throwing back.  His voice makes it unclear.  ”Still, he doesn’t fuck around with his job.”

“Nope. How’re things b—back at the ranch?”

“Good. We’re missing our resident holy fucking terror, so everybody’s pretty mellow ‘round here.”

“Like it’s ever _mellow_ in a Shatterdome,” Yancy points out, privately thinking to himself that if Herc was really so overjoyed about having Chuck out of his hair, he wouldn’t be calling to ask about him.

“Yeah, nah, there’s a war on, ‘course it isn’t.”

“Noticed.”

“What an observant boy.  How’s that leg of yours?”

“Took my brother out dancing the other night.”

“On fucking Kodiak Island?  You boys bring the night with, huh, or has the place gotten more fun since I was there for basic?”

“The party d—don’t start ‘til I walk in, sir,” Yancy says, tacking the last bit on the end mostly to emphasize the straight-faced manner in which he says it.

Herc chokes on his coffee.

* * *

 

When Yancy complains about his job, Tendo says the same thing every time: “It could be worse.  It could be raining.” The only reason it’s _not_ raining right now is because Anchorage is so cold it’s snowing instead, so Yancy leans across the couch between them to shove his head to the side with one hand.  Alison, who is sitting across the room with her computer on her lap, rolls her eyes. “Haven’t seen Raleigh in forever, by the way.  Drag him up here sometime.”

Yancy sighs. “He’s still n—not really doing the whole p— _people_ thing.”

“Bring him anyway.”

“When he wants to come.”

Alison looks up and signs at Yancy across the room, _Idiot_.

Yancy signs back, _You love him_.

Tendo says, “Hey.  Speak out loud.”

“We’re t—talking shit,” Yancy says solemnly.  Possibly the greatest discovery of his life has been that Alison knows ASL. Way better than he does, actually. They’ve been fucking with Tendo over it for his last three visits.

The woman herself shuts her laptop and gets up, crosses the room to stretch out on the couch between them.  They’re in her apartment, mostly because it’s _not_ a PPDC bunk, and she’s shorter by Yancy by nearly a foot, so she fits neatly between them when she lies down, head on Tendo’s lap at one end of the couch and feet on Yancy’s at the other.  “Night in, boys?” she asks them casually.

Tendo bends down to kiss her instead of answering, a contortion which makes Yancy raise his eyebrows.

“Did you get a—a rib removed or something?”

“I tried to get him to suck his own dick once,” Alison says, never one to shy away from crudeness.  “It was hilarious.”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Tendo says, but it’s too late, Yancy’s already laughing at him.


	7. Kodiak Island; 2021-2025

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh look. i did get two chapters out today.
> 
> that's probably the saddest thing i've ever had to say to myself.
> 
> anyway, in which yancy takes his shirt off and i'm a moron and i'm honestly sorry about everything?

“We’re getting married,” Tendo tells him, sneaking a hand under his shirt, which he still insists on wearing, even in bed.  The both of them are always pushing that, though.  Alison insists it’s a wonder they’d even managed to get him out of his pants.

He doesn’t tell them how absolutely right she is. “Yeah?”

“Shh. She doesn’t know yet.”

“Cool. Give me first crack at b—best man and I might not tell her.”

“I heard all of that,” Alison calls from the other room.

He’s honestly impressed by the sheer inventiveness of Tendo’s swearing.

* * *

 

The kaiju start winning.

It’s a slow thing.

They start losing Jaegers—the Miracle Mile is breached six times in two years and five of the kaiju that do it make landfall, which, in Yancy’s opinion, is too many kaiju for this few years anyway, not even counting the ones the PPDC stops on time.

He’s sitting in a meeting of Shatterdome and PPDC facility admin heads—other than the Academy, there’s a hospital in Chile, and a legal office in Japan, and a PR department in California, all of whom get their own representatives to this gathering—when Pentecost tells them the program is in trouble.

The list of complaints is endless.  They’re environmentally detrimental.  They’re a money sink.  They’re not efficient. They’re too commercial. They’re not commercial enough. They’re causing diplomatic problems. They're not good role models for the kids.  Their hiring practices exclude citizens of countries not on the Rim, which is bullshit, but whatever. The one thing Yancy appreciates about conducting this meeting through a bunch of screens is that nobody can whisper to each other, they just have to sit there and listen. It makes everything a lot faster and more honest.

“So what do we do?” asks the newest member of this particular group meeting, an Israeli girl stationed at Lima.  The prior admin head of the Lima ‘dome had died a week ago, along with his copilot, defending the Miracle Mile off the city, and apparently, his first priority while dying had not been to tell her that when Marshal Stacker Pentecost is holding a meeting, you don’t interrupt with questions until he asks for them.

Yancy guesses a little bit of the blame for her not knowing that falls on him, too, because she’s one of his, from his second Academy class. He can’t tell if she’s looking at him or not, because they’re all on screens, but he suspects she is and also that no one else is, so he shakes his head minutely, and sure enough, she closes her mouth with an audible snap.

But Pentecost doesn’t reprimand the interruption.  Just sighs.  “What we do is regain favour.”

Yancy already knows what’s coming.  He glances at Herc’s screen for a moment and sees him looking grim, which he takes to mean he’s not wrong.  Herc doesn’t bother with his poker face as much as Pentecost does with his, and Yancy has realized over the past few years that the only person Pentecost ever goes to for advice—and therefore the only person who isn’t guessing about what he’s going to say before he says it—is Hercules Hansen.

The Marshal continues.  “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re letting the press into the Shatterdomes.”

There’s a moment of silence.

Yancy breaks it, because someone has to. “Oh, fuck me.”

It’s not that funny, but it gets a smattering of laughter.

“Watch your mouth, Captain Becket.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your orders,” the Marshal says, addressing all of them now, “are to play nice and run smooth.  If you have a better face you put on for the media, now is the time to use it. If there’s drama or trouble in your ‘dome, you have a week to fix it.  We are going to look _effective_ , _efficient_ , and _attractive_.  Anyone who was around for our initial recruitment will remember how we were handling the press at that time.  This is going to be a repeat, but with less room for error.  You are no longer allowed to play off mistakes as a learning curve. There will be,” and now his voice has dropped into what Yancy likes to call the _Deadly Serious Octave_ , “no mistakes.”

The faces on the screens are all nodding now, because when the Marshal speaks in the Deadly Serious Octave everyone with any sense stands to attention and gets their head in the game.

“You will have a week before I throw open the doors.  If we can’t get bureaucratic support, we’ll have to increase our popular support.  So _give them what they want_.  Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir.” The chorus is easily the only amusing thing about this conversation.

When he gets home, Raleigh is pretending not to notice that the news that’s playing is re-coverage of the fall of Diablo Intercept.

It’s like he actually believes Yancy thinks he doesn’t care anymore.

Yancy drops onto the couch next to him and slings an arm around his shoulders, watching the coverage for a minute before he turns his head to his brother and tells him, “Hey, kid, the island’s about to be crawling with press. If you don’t want your handsome face all over the news, I’d call out sick from work for the whole w—week they’re here.”

Raleigh used to love press.  Now he just looks unhappy. Yancy wants to make him smile again, but he doesn’t know how anymore.  “Great,” he sighs.  “Just what I need.”

“Hey, at least _you_ get to avoid it.”

“Ha.” His brother’s voice is flat. “I’m not a pilot, why would they want to talk to me?”

 

Yancy’s speech has gotten a hell of a lot better—mostly now he only trips on repeated sounds and when he’s some flavour of emotional, but he still always conducts interviews over text when he can.  So giving a reporter a tour of the Academy—which the press has never been allowed inside, not even in the early days—is weird for him.

It’s even weirder because the reporter is Naomi Solokov, who is profiling the Icebox when she’s done here.

She evinces no interest in him.  Which probably shouldn’t sting a little, because he never even came close to emotionally attached to her, but kind of does. 

“Can you show us your leg, Captain Becket?” her photographer requests as they make it back up to his office.

He knew this question was coming.  Has a cutesy response ready.  He sits down, because he can’t really bend over properly, what with the metal up his spine, and pulls his right leg up to tug his pants out of the tight tuck into the top of his boot, rolling them up to reveal his real leg, stopping just before the graft and burn scars start.

Naomi snickers, and he grins while the photographer blushes.  “I’m sorry,” he coughs, looking bashful, and Yancy lets go of the fabric and lets it fall again.

“Nah,” he says, “just messing with you.”

He yanks up his left pant leg to reveal the metal.  It’s not the same one from Mako’s stay—a second version—but it looks pretty similar.  The improvements mostly made it lighter and reduced the "possible" neural load. He’s also no longer having problems with occasional electric shocks.

It looks a lot like a Jaeger leg, still, but the shape has been smoothed, refined, so it looks a little more human, too.  “ _Damn_ ,” the photographer whispers as he raises his camera and starts snapping pictures.

“I know,” Yancy replies, “that’s pretty much what I said when I put it on.”

“You’ve been very secretive about your recovery, Captain Becket,” Naomi says, sitting down across from him and crossing her legs.  Just to show that he can, too, he mirrors the motion, although he knows it’ll leave bruises on his good leg, probably.   “But it seems like it’s gone very well.  How extensive were your injuries?”

Yancy tries to channel Raleigh’s former media presence and slap a cutesy smile on his face, but he’s pretty sure he does a terrible job.  “Very extensive.  Looked like I’d been through a meat grinder.”

 _Looks_ , he thinks.

Naomi raises her eyebrows and opens her mouth to ask another question, but he continues, because he has a job here, and that job is plugging the boys in robots. “PPDC engineers helped me out with the leg, obviously.  Based on Jaeger technology.  If you’ve ever gotten to see Striker Eureka—”

“No,” Naomi says, and Yancy gives her a brief duck of his head.

“—well, it looks a lot like—like her legs.  Just smaller.  Google her, she’s a beauty.” That one is mostly for Herc, who will doubtless have to read this interview and laugh at it if she bothers to report it.

“Better or worse than Gipsy Danger?” she probes, smiling prettily now. Her teeth are extremely straight, he notices with some distraction.

“I’m biased, Miss Solokov,” he says.  “Gipsy’s always going to feel like my girl on some level.”

God, it’s been almost four years and it still hurts how _past tense_ that statement is.

“Did you know they’re restoring her?”

“Yeah,” he answers.  “Tendo Choi’s in charge of the project.  He’s a good friend of mine from my run through the Academy.”

And that is about _all_ he plans to say about Tendo Choi.  He turns the conversation back around to subtly implying that the PPDC is the greatest thing since the invention of internet porn, because if there’s one thing Yancy Becket is excellent at these days, it’s listening to Marshal Pentecost.

Last time he didn’t, see, he lost a leg.

That and working with the man closely for any length of time makes even someone as independent and occasionally authority-challenged as Yancy always has been want to straighten up and salute.

 

Naomi wants to do an article on him and the Academy, she tells him when he takes her and her photographer out for dinner.  Mostly because he’s basically a walking, talking, PPDC success story, due to the fact that he’s _walking and talking_ —but also because, he thinks, this is the kind of story she’s good at, character and narrative profiling.

So maybe he did his research.

Maybe he also hasn’t told Raleigh she’s here.

Bygones are probably bygones, but it’s best not to chance it, he thinks.

He’s toeing the line with this whole press thing, he really is.  But the profile they want to do, a sort of _now and then_ thing, makes him want to throw that stupid camera at the wall and probably the photographer with it.  He barely manages to keep his cool while they’re proposing it and he’s saying _yes_ because he remembers the words _give them what they want_ and he does actually break a glass when he gets home because at least they aren’t photographing him here.

“Fuck—fucking press,” he snarls at Raleigh, who raises his eyebrows and bends down to start cleaning up the glass, because for all of the amazing things Mako’s brainchild of a prosthetic can do, he still can’t really kneel properly.

He does the article anyway.  The article’s not the bad part, really, it’s the pictures.  The title of the piece takes up two pages—on the first one, an old picture of him and Raleigh from the cover of some magazine, back to back on some beach in California, some time after Yamarashi.

Raleigh’s laughing, with his head thrown back.  It’s barely visible, but Yancy, who knows it’s there, can see the little cut on his neck the kid had given himself that morning shaving, covered by makeup.

The reasons they picked this picture, though, are almost painfully transparent to Yancy. For one, Raleigh’s absence at his back is so obvious it’s almost like they printed a giant question mark in his place with _Where Did Raleigh Becket Go_ as the headline.  For two, the two of them were wearing swim trunks, which means Yancy gets to show off all his _damage_.

He almost refuses to take his shirt off when they ask him to recreate the picture, but he’s so pissy about their agenda that instead, after a moment’s angry pause, he just shrugs out of his jacket and rips his shirt off over his head, hoping to shock them into contrition.

And Naomi’s gasp is probably audible the next room over.  The photographer nearly drops his camera. With the wreckage of scar tissue, surgical incisions, and burns all over his right side and abdomen catching the cool air in the office, Yancy feels excruciatingly exposed, wants nothing more than to drop to the floor behind his desk and hide.   Instead, he smiles, so sharply he’s sure he looks dangerous, and lets out a shaky exhale through his teeth, concealing his discomfort. “St—still want a picture, guys?”

Of course they do.

The second page of the article title spread is Yancy leaning back against air where Raleigh used to be, metal leg sticking out from under the bottom of the shorts, ugly, angry scars crawling out the top.

He spends the whole interview after that trying not to sound too desperate and pissed-off.  The fifth time she tries to drag Raleigh into it, though, he loses his cool, already on edge, and snaps, “Leave my brother out of this.”

Funny thing, he said that to her years ago, too, but he was kissing her neck, then.

The article she writes is far from charitable, but it garners the sympathy vote, at least, and Pentecost sends him a short message telling him good job, like Yancy’s brittle touchiness about his body and his brother were some sort of façade to make himself look broken and pitiable.  Herc calls him too, but Yancy doesn’t pick up.  Alison texts him with _i would have kicked her to the curb thirty seconds in, kudos on the patience_.  He just says _Haha_ to that and then turns off his phone and leaves it in his desk drawer when he goes home.

He refuses to let a copy anywhere near the house, but he knows Raleigh reads it anyway, because when he comes through the door the kid hugs him.  Doesn’t mention the article, but hugs him. Then swings through the kitchen to start making food, telling Yancy about how his day was the same way he does every day, now.

Yancy misses, viscerally, being able to know everything that’s going on in his head. Misses being that close.

 _That_ doesn’t make its way into the press.

* * *

 

The program doesn’t make it another year.  Shatterdomes start closing.  Jaegers are still being taken out.  Even some of the ones that don’t get taken down by the kaiju get decommissioned, which is the stupidest thing Yancy’s ever heard.  The coastal wall program, which has been talked about for as long as Yancy can remember, starts actually moving, and before long, when he visits Anchorage—where they’re restoring Gipsy—he can’t see out into the bay.

Four techs get seriously injured falling off her or in electrical accidents, he hears, although he can’t bring himself to go look at her.  He knows Mako's in there working on her—hell, Tendo is too, half the time—but he stays out of the bay.

 _Lady Danger_ , they start calling her.  He kind of likes it.

She gets kind of a reputation.

He kind of likes that, too.

That their girl doesn’t want hands on her that aren’t theirs.

Herc wires through to him in the middle of the day with the bad news that the Jaeger program is on its final legs, but that _Stacks has an idea. Final throwdown_ , and Yancy knows he must be agitated, or he wouldn’t have slipped up on the nickname.

“Bundle up the kiddies who’re on Ranger Ready.  You’re relocating to Hong Kong.  And—” Herc pauses, like he knows Yancy’s not going to like what he’s about to say next. “—bring your brother.  Marshal's orders.”


	8. Hong Kong; January 2025.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in which yancy becket is trying really hard to be a good older brother and i take it to ELEVEN chapters because i am an Idiot

Raleigh refuses to step onto on the plane the PPDC provides, which Yancy thinks is a pointless objection, given that whether he likes it or not, his final destination is the Hong Kong Shatterdome and he’s going to talk to Marshal Pentecost. In fact, he seems pretty accepting of all of that, he just won’t get on the plane.

So Yancy schedules his brother’s flight a day after the Academy one. Just in case Raleigh needs somewhere to come when he gets to Hong Kong, so he can skip all the waiting around to be shown to his quarters if it turns out he really can’t deal with being in the ‘dome on his own.

It’s raining when Raleigh’s plane arrives, and Yancy, who avoids getting the metal leg wet whenever possible, even though it’s technically waterproof, waits for him in the doorway when his brother sets foot on PPDC-owned ground for the first time since his discharge.  He takes it pretty well, Yancy thinks, but he barely manages to keep a grimace off his face when Pentecost heads straight for him and Mako brings up the rear.

Then he follows the two of them, because he’s not about to let what Raleigh probably views as a confrontation happen without him there to have his brother’s back.

He has no idea what they say to each other before he gets there, but Raleigh is, against all odds, smiling when he jogs up.

* * *

 

He knows he’s hovering.

He knows it, but he can’t stop.

Pentecost keeps giving him looks, and he can read the man well enough by now that he knows they mean _back off, Becket_ , but he just can’t bring himself to leave Raleigh by himself.  Maybe it’s because when they were back home in the ‘dome there, they were always joined at the hip. Maybe it’s because Raleigh’s more fragile than he lets on.  Maybe it’s because even though Raleigh has been nearly two inches taller than him since he was seventeen and has only really gained muscle since leaving the PPDC, he looks small under the dim lights of the Jaeger bay.

Yancy isn’t usually like this. He isn’t the _hovering_ type.  He protects Raleigh by giving his everything to making a world where he can do whatever the hell he wants, not by sitting on his shoulder and keeping the world away from him.

He still follows at Raleigh’s heels as they walk through the bay.  A role reversal he doesn't much like.

Pentecost solves the problem by closing his office door in Yancy’s face after he lets Raleigh in.  The snap of it shutting almost on his nose is a clearer stop order than any he could possibly have been given out loud.

Mako stands with him in the hallway, looking directly at the wall across the from them. He’s anxious because he can’t hear what’s going on in the office—for Raleigh’s first conversation in almost five years with the Marshal.  He’s also anxious because he has no idea what the Marshal is actually going to say to him or what he wants from him.  Mako doesn’t talk.  The silence doesn’t really help.

“So how far did you get on Gipsy before the Icebox got shut down?”

“She is here,” Mako answers, which he hadn’t even noticed when he was walking through the bay.  How do you miss something that tall?  “And she is almost repaired. Would you like to see her?” For the first time since he learned how to run again, he catches brief pride in her eyes.

“Later,” he replies, because he has a feeling he’s going to be seeing a lot of Gipsy before the world ends—if they brought her here.

For a moment, it’s silent.  Then— “Where did you and your brother learn Japanese?” she asks suddenly.

“Travelled a lot when we were little.  We were in Japan for six months.  Why?” He turns to look at her, carefully studying her face.  She’s turned to face him, at some point, and he hadn’t noticed it.  A helpful little part of his mind supplies the information that she doesn’t tend to face away from people when talking to them and never has, so he ought not to be surprised.

Her face is carefully blank.  “I thought it might be recent.  It is not listed in his file.”

Yancy frowns.  “I could swear we put that in there.”

“It is in yours.  Not in his. His only lists English and French as languages of fluency.”

“Well, you can add Japanese, Port—Portuguese, and Spanish, if you want to update it.”

She’s already doing it, on her tablet.

“You don’t speak Spanish?”

“No. He took it in high school.” He gives into his curiosity. “Why’s he here?”

She looks at him across the top of the tablet and doesn’t say anything. He hates that. But, like it did when Raleigh used to do it to him, it makes him think about what she might be holding back. And he’s not an unintelligent man. Gipsy’s repair lines up in his head with the final stand of living pilots and Jaegers that they saw in the bay lines up with Raleigh being the only living, functioning Mark III. pilot left lines up with _bring your brother Marshal’s orders_.

“You’re going to put him back in Gipsy.”

“Maybe,” she answers, slightly cagey, and there’s the barest tinge of skepticism in her voice.

“ _Maybe_?” he repeats, because no, if they’re going to put Raleigh back in Gipsy they’d better fucking do it, not dangle it in front of him like a prize and then take it away from him.

“Maybe,” she says again, dipping her chin.  “He would not have been my first choice.  Although he is not quite what I was expecting.”

One of the things Yancy has liked about her since she was a cadet is her bluntness, when she wants to be blunt.  Still, he bristles at the perceived dismissal of his brother. He wants to tell her Raleigh’s a damned good pilot and a damned good fighter.  But Raleigh’s technically not either of those things anymore. And he knows it. So he bites his tongue.

He stops talking and wonders what about him was _unexpected_ instead.  Raleigh hasn’t done anything too out of character yet.  Or maybe Yancy is just so used to the new Raleigh that he’s no longer fazed to the things that surprise people whose only knowledge of him comes from before.

The Raleigh who walked into the Hong Kong Shatterdome today looks different than he did when he left in 2020.  He’s rougher around the edges—stubble on his jaw, broader shoulders, broader hands. Things Yancy didn’t even consciously notice him developing.  Hair doesn’t stick up so much anymore because at some point, he stopped styling it so carefully. Old eyes.  He looks like a man now, he supposes.  Where before, even with all his neat combat muscle showing on his frame, his face still gave him some of that boyish aura.

He doesn’t smile so frequently.  Doesn’t laugh so much.  Yancy has been trying to maintain his own version of “normal”, but Raleigh has made no such effort.

Yancy hasn’t even noticed, not really, how old Raleigh has gotten in the last five years. He’s twenty-six. He’s twenty-six and he’s got lines on his face and his words are jaded half the time and Yancy _doesn’t know how to fix that_.

Which does not alleviate his feeling that something horrible is going to happen.

He’s almost surprised when Raleigh walks out of the Marshal’s office _not_ looking like he’s been mauled by a kaiju.  He changes that to definitely full-on surprised when Raleigh nods to Mako, back getting so close to dipping into a bow Yancy narrows his eyes and flicks them to his brother’s face.

“So what happened?” he asks when they’re out of earshot, trying not to notice how easy it is to fall right into step with Raleigh, how keeping pace with him is a thoughtless thing, how they swing the corner at the exact same time.  How they're probably still drift-compatible if he could just fucking drift.

“Wants me back in Gipsy,” Raleigh says.

And he sounds casual about it.

And Yancy studies his brother’s face _very_ closely, because the last time somebody suggested Raleigh get back in something _vaguely resembling_ Gipsy he quit the whole shebang.  Was five years enough to get over it?  Is it that it’s Gipsy again and not some other Jaeger? Maybe he’s missed it enough that he’s willing to go in without Yancy now.

He doesn’t know what Raleigh’s thinking anymore.  It’s been so long since they drifted and so much has changed, it’s like after Mom died; Yancy just can’t quite fathom everything going on inside his brother’s brain.  Not anymore.

He tries not to feel a little bitter over his own incompetence and fails. Tries not to feel a little jealous because Raleigh gets Gipsy again and he never will.  Fails again.

“Yeah,” he prompts eventually.  “So, what’d you say?”

He should _know_.  If they were still drifting, he would.

“Said I’d show up for compatibility trials.”

“Why’s now different from five years ago?”

“Now the world is ending.”

Raleigh climbs the stairs into their quarters.  Doesn’t look back at his older brother over his shoulder. Yancy looks up at the open door he leaves behind him and tries not to feel like he’s being left behind.

He sort of fails at that, too.

 _The world has been ending for a long time_ , he doesn't say.

 

Yancy sits on a bench in the corner as his little brother is stretching, stepping up to the mats.  Watching him. Tendo’s sitting on his left side, not watching anything, tapping away at his phone screen and eating something that Yancy doesn’t even want identified.

Herc drops onto the bench next to him, looking tired.

“Why the long face, Yancy?”

Both Tendo and Yancy look up.  Tendo nods at him, realizing he’s not being addressed, and looks straight back down, but Yancy just snorts and raises his eyebrows.  “Good morning to you too, sunshine.”

Pass off his stupid sick feeling with being a smartass.

“Fuck off. It started yet?”

“Nope. Raleigh’s still stretching.”

Raleigh’s not, anymore, he’s actually flipping a Korean kid over his head with the staff. Yancy’s best and brightest are facing up against his little brother and yeah, actually, Raleigh is basically using them as warm-ups.

Chuck Hansen’s back thuds into the wall on the other side of Tendo. Herc doesn’t even react, but Yancy looks at him.  “So everybody’s coming to see, then?”

“Might as fucking well,” Chuck and Herc say, simultaneously, and Yancy only barely holds back on cracking up as Hansen, Jr. goes pink about the ears. Tendo doesn’t quite restrain his choking half-laugh around whatever the fuck that is he’s eating, and Chuck looks like he’s thinking about rounding on him for a second, then doesn’t.

On the mats, Raleigh drops another of Yancy’s kids.

He’s distracted.

Yancy knows, he’s been in Raleigh’s opponent’s place enough times to know that he’s not putting his everything into it, which is weird, for Raleigh, who always puts his everything into _everything_. The last time Yancy saw him fight like this was five years ago at his last round of compatibility trials.

But Raleigh isn’t looking at _him_ , this time.  He’s looking at Mako.

Yancy takes three rounds to notice it.  The part of him that’s spent hours grading kids on this shit is assessing Raleigh’s moves and finding them lacking, but that’s probably because he’s out of practice, or something.  Raleigh has never been anything less than a good fighter.  Yancy doesn’t doubt him.

Raleigh keeps looking at Mako, though.  It’s throwing him off.

He keeps looking at Mako.

“Fucker’s distracted,” Chuck mutters, and Yancy wants to say _don’t talk about my brother like that_ , except he’s not sure if "fucker" might actually be polite in Australian and he’s also right, Raleigh’s off his game.

Raleigh drops Yancy’s last pupil in thirty seconds.

Then he points his staff at Mako and starts being a mouthy little brat. Yancy doesn’t even _have_ to listen to him to know what he’s saying, but he listens anyway.  “Oh my god,” he moans, burying his face in his hands.  He really cannot save Raleigh from pissing off the Marshal, the kid just goes for it like it’s an okay thing to do.

“Your brother’s an idiot,” Chuck tells him.

There’s something nasty in his voice that makes Yancy want to punch him, but he’s also _right again_ , so it’s not really kosher.

“—best and brightest can’t cut it in the ring with me?”

Yancy knows Raleigh’s just goading to get what he wants, which, it seems, is Mako Mori, which, _by the way_ , Yancy tried to tell him so years ago, but he wasn’t in a _listening mood_ then.  But it’s still a stupid thing to say.

He’s surprised when the Marshal caves to the pressure, although his guess is that it’s not Raleigh’s rudeness that does it, it’s the pleading look Mako shoots him.

And Raleigh’s trying to advise her on the mats.

Now would be a great time for someone to tell his kid brother that she learned from Stacker Pentecost how to cut it on the mats, and she really doesn’t need the pointers.

“Mako’s going to tear him apart,” Chuck comments, sounding kind of pleased about it. And Yancy needs him to shut up, because he’s trying to be a good brother, but it’s hard when the peanut gallery keeps making comments that have some merit.

“Shh, Chas,” Herc scolds, saving Yancy the trouble as he stares at the two people on the mats circling each other.

“Oi, don’t call me that, old man,” is background noise as they attack.

He would give anything to be in Mako’s place right now. Wants to be on the mat across from Raleigh, wants to be anticipating his moves that way, countering them, striking back. Wants to be the one moving in tandem with him.  His jealousy is guilty and overwhelming and he’s sure it’s written all over his face, naked longing in his eyes, because Tendo takes him by the shoulder and pulls him back against the wall as Mako slides through Raleigh’s defenses like they’re not even there and flips him hard onto the mat.

And Raleigh—Raleigh just lies there, panting, staring at her like he’s seeing Hugo’s _face of God_ or something equally poetic.

They’re so obviously drift compatible, Yancy has to look away from the two of them. So he looks at Pentecost, who is wearing about the same expression he thinks he’s probably got on. Irritation mixed with pride mixed with conflict.

By the time Pentecost is gone, Chuck is pushing himself off the wall to give Raleigh a meaningful smirk—which Yancy misses the meaning of, because he wasn’t at dinner last night, he took about six pills and passed out, trying to regain that effortless sleep-everywhere vibe he used to have because's pretty sure he’ll wish he had more rest soon.  When he glances at Raleigh for a translation, Raleigh still isn’t looking at him, he’s looking at the doorway.

Herc, on the other hand, looks halfway between pissed-off and guilty, which is no more illuminating than his brother avoiding his eyes.

“Hey, you okay?” Tendo asks as they’re walking out of the room.  Raleigh’s gone already.  Yancy thinks, with that same stupid, stabbing jealousy that he shouldn't even be feeling, that he’s probably run off after Mako.

“Peachy,” he replies, but his voice sounds hollow even to him. Raleigh left this morning before he woke up.  He hasn’t actually said three words to his brother all day.  “Show me Gipsy,” he says instead, because he is a fucking masochist.

Tendo takes him to the LOCCENT deck, and from there it’s like he’s looking right into her eyes.  He can’t speak for a long time, just looking at her.  _Our girl_ , he thinks, and then corrects the thought, because it’s not _theirs_ anymore, it’s not _his_. _He’s_ not driving her.  “You guys did a great job,” he says mechanically.  “Looks good as new.”

The hull doesn’t show any sign of Knifehead tearing through it.

“Miss Mori did most of that,” Tendo tells him.  “I just followed around checking blueprints.  She’s got a sword now.  It’s awesome.”

He sounds so fucking happy about it.

Yancy should be happy about it too.

Except he feels like he can feel his toes on his left leg, even though he knows they’re not there, and he feels like he could feel the tug of muscles in his thigh if he knelt now, but he can’t even fucking kneel because of the ankle joint’s bend restrictions.  Because he doesn’t have two legs, he has one, and a spine full of whatever fucking metal they pumped him full of, and brain damage, and he digs his painkillers out of his pocket and swallows two dry even though he’s not really in any more pain than usual, he just sort of wants to get high.

The heavy-duty stuff will do that to him; make him kind of loopy.

Fortunately, Tendo is used to him popping pills enough that he doesn’t think twice about it. Yancy leans his body forward as far as he can before his spine stops him and rests his chin on the lower bar of the handrail.  It’s a long way down from where they are.

Tendo sits down next to him.  “She’s a beauty, isn’t she,” he hums after a while.

“Sure,” Yancy replies.

Tendo elbows him, lightly.  “You sure you’re okay?”

“Nah,” Yancy tells him, which is about as honest as he’s probably ever going to be about how he’s feeling right now.  “But I’ll get over it.”

He doesn’t need to move his head to know the look Tendo’s giving him, and when he feels lips on his cheek it doesn’t even surprise him.  “I’ll be hanging around the control room if you want something.”

Then he’s gone.

Yancy stares at Gipsy again, willing himself to not be a piece of shit about Raleigh finally getting to have this back.

It’s just—he wants it back, too.

But that’s just not fucking happening.

* * *

 

He gets the bottom bunk, now, in their quarters, because he can’t get to the top without the prosthetic, and he doesn’t sleep with it on.  He crawls into it several hours later, glad for the first time in five years of the lack of ghost drift so that Raleigh can’t tell how stupidly, pointlessly envious he is.  He doesn’t even know who he’s jealous of, Raleigh or his copilot.

Raleigh, who still never sleeps, swings into his bunk the second he hears the metallic clunk of Yancy standing his prosthetic up by the side of the bed. “Yance,” he whispers, and Yancy knows from years of knowing Raleigh why he’s doing it even though there’s no one else in the room.  It’s dark, so Raleigh’s whispering.  That’s the way his brother has just always been.

“Yeah?” His voice is rough. He can hear it.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, kid. I’m awesome.  You did good today.”  At least in the dark Yancy only has to be encouraging with his tone, his face can do whatever he feels like doing with it, which at the moment is nothing. “Kicked some serious ass.”

“Not Mako’s,” Raleigh whispers, because even though Yancy’s at normal speaking volume, yes, he is still whispering.

“No,” he replies. And wills himself to really be proud of the both of them, because it was a _good_ fight.  A good talk. And he loves his brother, and always will. “Not Mako’s.”

Raleigh's silence after that  _sounds_ happy.


	9. Hong Kong; January 2025.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HAHAHA this fic is turning into a hundred percent genuine piece of trash i'm just fucking inserting yancy into the movie now everything is terrible. i sincerely apologize for this chapter and this fic in general put me in the garbage bin where i belong
> 
> ugh i hate this chapter.

One of Yancy’s kids is helping Raleigh into his drivesuit, which he’s using as an excuse to be in the ready room with him—an excuse he doesn’t really need, because Pentecost probably wouldn’t even think of ordering him out, but one he wants to have, anyway.  The new suit designs, he thinks, must have been Mako’s work; they look like her style, which he’s rather familiar with, since he straps a piece of it onto him every morning. “Black, nice.  Very slimming.”

“Are you calling me fat?”  Raleigh replies, trying to sound indignant, but mostly managing a cocktail of nervous and excited.

“Well, I’m sure not calling you skinny.”

“Hey, are you forgetting who the handsome one is, old man?”  Raleigh steps through the hatch into Gipsy’s conn-pod, turns around to stick his head out to finish the sentence.

“Chuck Hansen’s rubbing off on you.”

“I hope not. He’s a dick.”

His brother moves to close the door, and Yancy only barely manages to say “Good luck, kid,” before it closes and seals.

* * *

 

It all goes to hell in a handbasket.

Everybody seems to expect it and not expect it all at once, but Yancy can _feel_ Raleigh go out of alignment the second before it happens—not consciously, but he stands from his chair and walks out of the tech room right before all hell breaks loose in LOCCENT.

It’s not a ghost drift.  That vanished five years ago.  This is just something Yancy has always had with Raleigh, a sixth sense of when he's in trouble.

He knows the memory that would have done it, too.  Breaks into a run across the upper decks as Gipsy’s plasmacaster starts charging—a terrible idea, because his balance isn’t good enough even after years with this thing that running on an uneven surface is a smart thing to do, but he has to get to Raleigh, even if that’s not really an option.

He’d tear Gipsy’s conn-pod apart himself if that was what it took.

Instead he has to wait for her to power down for her head to come into alignment with the hatch again, and he starts pounding on the door before it even unseals. “Raleigh!”

Raleigh can’t hear him through the metal. He knows that.  But he’s got to try anyway.

With a hiss, the pressure gives, and he rips the door open and tumbles through. Raleigh’s scrambling for his copilot, and Yancy is scrambling for his brother, and while once, those things occurring simultaneously would have meant a neat join-up between two people, now it means a mess of three.

Raleigh’s fine, though, or at least he is the second Mako’s eyes open.

Yancy doesn't even think about the fact that he's standing two feet from the place where Ranger Yancy Becket died.

 

Technically, he doesn’t have to be anywhere near the Marshal’s office. But he’s still sort of having that hovering problem, and he’s still trying to play it off like he’s overjoyed about all of this, even though what he’s learned in the past few hours is that it’s terrifying when Raleigh drifts without him, because there’s nothing he can do to keep him steady, then.

Him and Raleigh, they went out of alignment _one_ time.  In five _years_.

Two, if you count Knifehead, which he doesn’t.

Chuck Hansen is yelling so loud he can hear it through the walls, and every word is increasing Yancy’s previously absent desire to kick him in the jewels. Mako is staring straight at the floor, jaw held tightly, and next to her, standing just a little too close, is Raleigh, looking at her with the same expression Yancy probably has on his face, looking at him.

She’s obviously ashamed.

And Raleigh’s obviously feeling the effects of the drift, because he can’t seem to stop from mirroring her posture.

And Yancy, Yancy is listening to Chuck yelling about how incompetent the two of them are and having trouble feeling concern or shame, because instead he's feeling mounting anger. He also wants to know why the Marshal isn’t kicking Chuck’s insubordinate, disrespectful ass to the curb, except then he comes trotting out, and for once he doesn’t clear his face when he catches Yancy’s eyes, just marches up to the two of them and starts mouthing off like he’s not even there.

On rare occasions, Chuck shows respect to about four people, as far as Yancy has ever been made aware of, and those four people are the Marshal, Mako, Herc, and him.  He doesn’t know why he’s included in the sometimes-list.  He’s been curious before, but right now he cares more about the words Chuck is saying to his brother.

Mako beats him to the confrontation by about half a second—he knew he liked her for a reason—but Raleigh, with uncharacteristic restraint, stops her with a hand.

Then Chuck crosses the line.

Yancy knows Raleigh’s going to hit him before the kid even starts moving. Probably before his brother even registers the word.  Because Raleigh’s never liked the word _bitch_ when applied to a woman.  Dominique taught them better. And more so than Yancy, Raleigh doesn't take it well.  Especially, probably, when applied to Mako Mori.

He’s almost certain Mako can feel the power surging down Raleigh’s spine before he slams his fist into Chuck’s face, because _he_ can feel it, and _he_ didn’t drift with the kid half an hour ago.

Yancy oversees a school full of angry, stressed young adults who are learning how to punch each other for a living. Brawls are a weekly occurrence at their _least_ frequent. So he knows how to break up a fight, even though he can’t really join in anymore.  Mako—well, probably she couldn’t, because Chuck and Raleigh are both more than half a foot taller than her, much stronger, and much heavier. But either of them could stop Raleigh punching Chuck.  Because they both know it’s coming.

They don’t.

He doesn’t pretend to know how Mako’s mind works, but for him, it’s a conscious, split-second decision.  Sees it coming.  Thinks about it for a nanosecond.  Elects to let Raleigh get one in because of how seriously out of line that was.

Raleigh gets in two before Chuck lunges at him.

 _That’s_ when Yancy steps in.

Shoves himself in between them and grabs Chuck’s shirt front with one hand and tugs it up, shoves Raleigh backwards with the other.

That’s about as far as his plan goes.  Just break them up.

Which is a shame, because Chuck isn’t a cadet who’s terrified of him, he doesn’t just _stop_ when Yancy gets in there. Instead his right hand shoots out and delivers a blow to his spine that Yancy can’t stop because his left hand is at his collar.

It’s a good move.  It is. Because he doesn’t have to put that much force into it—it’s just a tap, really, as far as hits in a fight go—but it drops him instantly to the floor.  Feels like the thing’s been broken again, even though it hasn’t been and he would know it if he could think through the pain.

It’s also a dick move.  And Raleigh doesn’t take kindly to _that_ , either. He’s slamming Chuck back into the wall so hard he fucks up a pipe—which Yancy wants to take a second to be proud of, but he can’t really spare the time.

Instead, he breathes through his nose, trying to get calm, make his back stop spasming long enough to scramble to his feet and break them apart again, but as he’s pushing himself up with shaking arms, Herc and the Marshal are bursting out of the office, neatly dividing their labour—Herc goes for the fight, Pentecost bends a knee to help him to his feet, like they’ve practiced this or something.

He can tell that his face is red, that it’s twisted into what must be a very ugly shape in pain, that he’s still shaking with the effort of staying upright. Moreover, he feels _neutered_. Because some twenty-one-year-old piece of shit took him out with one hit.  “’m fine,” he growls at Raleigh when their eyes meet, briefly, the anger in his voice all for himself.

It’s a lie.

Even at its worst, his pain almost  _never_ gets this high.  He can barely stand.

But he’s not going to admit to it.

“Becket,” Pentecost orders, and Yancy forces himself to turn his neck to look at him before he realizes he’s not being addressed.  “Mori.  Into my office.”

Mako takes off without a second thought for the door.  Raleigh, though, still breathing hard and looking pissed as hell, looks at Yancy like he’s waiting for him to second the order. Yancy jerks his head in the direction of the office door and instantly regrets it.  “I’m fine,” he says again.

The second the door closes he sits down hard again, which sends another bolt of pain up his back, head spinning.

Herc’s crouched by his side before he can try fumbling for his pills. “You need medical, Captain?”

“No,” he answers, responding to the title, which is what tells him Herc is serious. “J—just need a minute."

Chuck is storming off, in the background.

"He needs his ass kicked," Yancy tells Herc.

"That's what your brother said."

 

Leatherback and Otachi hit while Yancy’s passed out.  In Hong Kong, he’s been taking pills like there’s no tomorrow either to get to sleep, to get the tension out of his back, to alleviate the pain, or just to be out of it, just for a few moments that are never enough.  It’s almost like the old days, almost sleeping through kaiju attacks, but Raleigh’s not in the room to wake him up.  Instead one of his cadets, an African girl with a shaved head who’s shorter even than Alison, who is five two on a good day, bangs on the door until she realizes he’s not answering and opens it anyway.

She’s his favourite and she knows it, much as he tries not to show favouritism, or she wouldn’t be able to get away with this shit.   Shakes him awake. “No, Raleigh,” he slurs, on reflex.

“Captain Becket—wake up, there’s a double event.”

“Fucking—Jalloh, why the hell are you here?”

He’s kind of halfway to sober right now, okay.

“ _There’s a double event_ , sir.”

It reaches him this time.  He sits up so fast he smacks his head on Raleigh’s empty bunk.  “Agh, _fuck_ —you’re joking—”

“Striker, Cherno, and Typhoon are already out.”

He swings out of bed, half-naked, but he doesn’t even pay attention to it as he tugs on shorts and starts strapping on his leg.  “—Gipsy?  Hand me my pants.”

She does. “Still grounded.”

At least he didn’t miss Raleigh and Mako going out again.

“Listen, cadet,” he instructs as he’s walking towards the door, still limping a little until he gets used to the leg again, a process he goes through every fucking day. He’s also listing a little to the left. “I’m a _little_ out of it right now.”

“I noticed, sir.”

“Shh.” He’s not Pentecost and he never has been.  Can’t bring himself to be _that_ much of a hardass with his kids, although he’s fine with terrifying the shit out of them in class.  “I need you to cover for me if I do something stupid.”

“Yes, sir.”

It takes him ten minutes to climb the stairs to the LOCCENT deck, and he thinks he’s about to die by the time he gets to the top, but it’s still faster than finding and waiting on the elevator.  The Shatterdome isn’t exactly handicap accessible.

It looks like half the ‘dome’s crammed into the room, and Raleigh gets him a chair without even turning to look at him. They’re so far in the back it’s hard to see the screen, but the running commentary from the front makes that somewhat irrelevant.

It’s been a while since he’s actually been near in a real drop.  Five years, in fact.  And _Jesus_ , the kaiju are fast.

“—you are to hold your ground, do not engage. We need you to carry that bomb, do you copy?” The Marshal’s words sound familiar to him.  _You know what I’m thinking_ echoes in his head.

So when Herc’s voice crackles over the radio, “—crew this, LOCCENT, we’re moving in now!” Yancy hopes this isn't another Knifehead.  Hopes Striker can take it like they couldn't.

Thank god Raleigh’s grounded.

 _Thank god_.

“Typhoon’s been grounded. We will kill this bastard.”

Yancy’s met the Kaidonovskys. He’s had both of them as visiting instructors.  They’re not _nice_ by any stretch of the imagination—most Jaeger pilots aren’t.  But they’re fun.  They’re a good couple.  Alexis taught the entire fall class of 2023 how to play the Ranger’s sport of cheating at cards—Yancy hears the lot of them were making a killing at their various ‘domes before the shutdown.  Sasha taught an extracurricular self-defense class to the two girls out of almost sixty insane enough to want extra work—all while wearing the most physics-defying heels Yancy has ever seen, mostly using her absolutely massive husband as a dummy.

“We’ve just lost Cherno, sir.”

Their deaths don’t make sense to him for a few seconds.

Striker’s air missiles are activating when the pulse goes out.

He doubles over his leg as it short-circuits, because it hurts like _bejesus_. He bites his tongue so hard it bleeds to keep himself quiet—only a strangled noise escapes him.  The pain is temporary, but blinding, and Raleigh’s on his knees in an instant on one side of him, Jalloh on the other. “I’m fine,” he says, “I’m fine,” but the leg won’t fucking move when he tries it, and the lights aren't coming on.  “Crutches,” he grits out, and Jalloh’s off like a shot.

“Yancy—”

In the background, Tendo is saying something about the blast.  Pentecost is giving out orders they can’t obey, which isn’t like him.

“I’m fine, kid, just—”

“—all the Jaegers, they’re digital—”

Raleigh is trying to help him find the catches to get the leg off without having to undo the whole strap, but his head snaps up at Mako’s voice.  “Gipsy is not.”

 _No_ , Yancy thinks, _no, no, no_.

He finally fumbles the straps free to pull off his leg, which gets him a couple of odd looks, but he’s not watching them, he’s watching his brother.  Raleigh is shooting upright to stand behind his copilot. “Gipsy’s nuclear,” he chimes in.

Gipsy can’t take two kaiju. She just can’t. Even with Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori behind the controls—and he’s probably the only person in this room who thinks that’s an “even with” and not an “especially with”.

He opens his mouth to say, _Raleigh, are you an idiot?_

The extremely brief glance Pentecost gives him makes him shut up on reflex.  “Very well. Suit up, Mr. Becket, Miss Mori.”

The second the two of them are out of the room, Yancy is struggling his way out of the chair to stand, leaning on the back of it to keep upright without a support on one side. “That’s suicide. You can’t send them out there to die.”

Pentecost is good at those _shut up_ looks, but it’s not stopping him this time. “What’s your suggestion, Captain Becket? That I leave Hong Kong to die instead?”

“ _One_ of those things t—took down Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon—G—Gipsy doesn’t have a chance in—chance in—”

“Captain, if you don’t stop questioning my orders, I’ll have you removed from the room.”

Yancy suspects the only reason he doesn’t just _do_ it is because he knows Yancy would put up even more of a fight about that. But he snaps his mouth shut anyway, hands shaking with anger, or terror, on the back of the chair.

When Jalloh comes back with his crutches, he’s already used the chair as a brace to move to the front of the room.  It had been a slow, painful process, especially with all these eyes on him, but—they make room for him.

Pentecost is ignoring him. He’s in for it later.

He doesn’t care. Gipsy is taking down Leatherback, and he can barely breathe.  For the second time in his life, he’s praying to a god he doesn’t even believe in, just in case.

“This fight isn’t going to take two hours, sir,” Tendo says.  He’s not talking to Yancy, but Yancy looks up anyway.  “We should get down to the wharf, or we’ll miss it.”

“I want _contact_ , Mr. Choi.”

“It’s not going to happen here better than it will anywhere else, sir.  We can try to rewire a radio to hook Gipsy in—”

“Do it. Everyone, _move_.”

The room erupts. Yancy fights his way to his feet. Tendo is ripping apart a couple of radios; one of Yancy’s cadets is holding the pieces for him as they’re walking out of the room.

Pentecost is long-gone.

* * *

 

By the time he gets to the water’s edge, late, he’s panting, his foot is aching, his back is informing him he’s put far too much strain on his shoulders, and he still doesn’t care. He doesn’t care. He almost falls over the barrier when he comes to a stop at it—Jalloh yanks him back by the back of his jacket.  The city is silent; the wharf is filled with silent whispers.  Two techs are trying to cram together the remains of a radio.

Where the hell is Gipsy?

“Where’s—” he starts, but the Marshal waves him quiet.

“Look, there!” Tendo says, pointing upwards.  The crowd’s eyes snap in the direction he’s pointing.

“Give me that radio,” Pentecost says, and one of the techs goes red and twists the dial, crackling static.

“Hang on, sir—”

Something that sounds vaguely like a voice comes through the speaker.  “—ousand feet.”

Pentecost grabs it away. “Gipsy, listen to me—”

Yancy’s heart is throbbing in his ears, he can barely hear over the sounds of it.  But it makes room for when Raleigh’s voice comes, tinny, over the radio: “We’re coming in too fast!  We’re coming in too fast!”

Yancy has to look away as Gipsy makes impact.

He wants to collapse.

He wants to die.

He’s not sure.

Cheers echo around him and his head comes from his hands.  Gipsy is rising from the rubble.  “Jesus Christ,” he says, “Jesus Christ,” and then he’s cheering, too.


	10. Hong Kong; January 2025.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1.) this ran long i am sorry for like almost 4000 words  
> 2.) i fucking hate rewriting the movie it makes me feel like a shitty self-insert but here it is. i hate this one less than the last one tho. because i got to add scenes not in the movie.  
> 3.) i've gotten really attached to herc & yancy  
> 4.) for the entirety of this chapter i was struggling not to write cherc and huck for some reason so if i left one in please just murder me  
> 5.) the next chapter should be... not... as shitty... hopefully...

Yancy’s waiting for Herc to come out of the doctor’s—not because the man needs moral support, but because somebody’s got to do it and Chuck’s fucked off to help with repairs—when he realizes that they’re down to one Jaeger for a _bomb run to the Breach_ , and it’s going to contain _his little brother_.

The office ejects Herc five minutes after he comes to this realization, and the man, with one arm strapped to his chest and walking purposefully, stops the moment he notices Yancy's pale face and the way his hands are white at the knuckles from how hard he's gripping them in each other.  “Look,” he says, sitting down next to Yancy, “there’s two kinds of people in the world. People who are born being able to take shit and people who have to practice, and the universe doesn’t always throw it at you accordingly.”

Yancy snorts, humourless.  He’d pay good money for a book of platitudes rewritten by Hercules Hansen. Not to mention that’s probably the most words he’s heard out of the man in one go.

“You and me, we’re the first kind.”

Yancy looks over at him and sighs.  “How many painkillers are you on, right now?”

“More than you can imagine, son.”

"Is that a fact."

Herc uses his good arm to punch him in the side, a gesture that typically no one but Raleigh trusts his shitty, fucked-up body to be able to handle. “Grab your ankles and deal with it, Yancy Becket.  Don’t dump it on your brother; he’s got enough to be worried about without worrying about you too.”

Yancy can’t smile at that.  He tries, but he can’t.  Instead he nods. “Yes, sir.”

* * *

 

“We need to get Gipsy and Striker back up and running,” Tendo tells him in the tone of an excuse as he sweeps past him back into LOCCENT, holding a handful of papers in one hand and a pen, a coffee mug, and another piece of paper, rolled-up, in the other.  There’s another pen behind his ear.  There’s a third in his pocket.  Yancy suspects he’s utterly forgotten about both of them.  “Love to hang out, but I’m on tap fixing the ladies.  Understaffed and overbooked, Becket boy, can’t spare the time.”

“Hey!” Yancy says. Tendo turns around and almost trips with the force of stopping his momentum.  “I’ve got twenty-seven pairs of hands who know their basic mechanics and learn fast. You think you could use some extra help?”

“I could kiss you, Captain Becket.  Bring ‘em into the hangar and I’ll divvy ‘em up to the crews.”

The part of Yancy that’s hard-wired to make a joke out of everything even when he doesn’t feel like joking says, “Maybe later, Mr. Choi,” as he's swinging around.  Three of his cadets are standing in the back of the room.  “All right, kids,” he says as he hobbles his way towards them. “Each of you go find eight friends and get your asses to the hangar.  It’s go time.”

“Yes, sir,” they chorus, and they scamper off before he can say anything else.

“Kids,” Yancy pronounces, even though, at twenty-nine, he’s younger than one third of the “kids” he’s talking about.  “They’re so cute.”

“Uh-huh,” Tendo says, running equipment checks.

A fourth pen has appeared in his mouth.

Yancy doesn’t know he’s smiling until he stops.

 

He goes to find his brother once he’s made sure all the kids are lined up and ready for orders, because apparently he needs more walking tonight.

But he finds Mako instead.  Perhaps their Drift is mixing up his radar for his brother.  She’s repairing Gipsy’s slightly crushed elbow rockets, conspicuous because of her drivesuit and the way everyone is moving around her.  “D’you know where Raleigh is?”

Of course she does.  “Speaking to sensei.”

He steps forward across the stage and hugs her with one arm.  She stiffens for a moment.  “Thanks for bringing him back in one piece.”

She relaxes. Mako, he thinks, likes it when things make sense.  He lets her go; that probably makes more sense than anything else that’s happened tonight. “It was not my effort alone.”

Yancy raises one eyebrow.  “I’m pretty sure he had nothing to do with that sword, Miss Mori.”

For a moment, she looks like she’s about to smile again, but she turns her face away and ducks under Gipsy’s arm.  “Bring him home again next time,” he tells her, after a moment of neither of them talking that can’t possibly be called silence in the commotion of the bay.

Her head pops up, just barely, over the top of the arm—three feet above his head. Momentarily, he wonders if Pentecost had to pull her down off the Jaegers much when she was a child; if she climbed everything that stood still like a monkey the way Jaz always used to. Wonders if she ever got into trouble, or if she was just as well-behaved then as she is now.

Raleigh probably knows.

“When we return I will repair your leg,” she informs him instead of saying _yes sir_ like he expects from a girl Stacker Pentecost raised.  It’s two kinds of promise, and her head drops back up out of view.

If they return, Yancy is giving Raleigh’s obviously crippling crush his unreserved blessing.

“Thanks.”

The sirens go off before he’s more than halfway across the bay.  _What the hell_ , he’s thinking as he freezes, because—

Attacks this closely spaced?  They can’t be on Hong Kong both.  What if it’s on the east side of the Pacific?  How will they get Gipsy there in time?  Yancy almost turns around and totters up to LOCCENT to ask, but he has to see Raleigh first. Because he’s not Chuck Hansen; the job isn’t the most important thing in the world.  Raleigh almost runs straight past him on his way to Mako—

But a one-legged man on crutches is kind of noticeable.  His brother screeches to a halt, turns around and jogs back to him. “Yancy!”

“You and Mako going out?”

“’course we are.  We’re going to the Breach.”

Yancy’s heart stops.  “Pitfall?”

“The kaiju signatures were detected around the Breach, apparently. We’re going in.”

“Signature _s_?”

“No more singles for us, apparently.  There’s two. You going to be in LOCCENT?”

“Yeah,” Yancy says, mouth dry.  “Yeah, I am.” On crutches, he can’t really hug his brother, or he’ll fall over.  He drops one instead, wrapping his right arm around Raleigh, and Raleigh turns into it, pulling him closer.  “I love you, kid,” he says into Raleigh’s neck.  “Go give ‘em hell, okay?”

Yancy Becket’s not a crier.  But god, it’s an effort to keep his voice steady.

“Gonna finish it, Yance,” Raleigh tells him, and his voice is fierce for a moment, and that’s not Raleigh, never was.  He can be protective, he can be determined, he can be angry.  But he’s not fierce.

That’s Mako.

“Yeah, kid,” he says, and tries not to let the uncertainty into his tone. “You are.  And then you’re gonna come home and play dumb blonde for the press.”

“Exactly,” Raleigh confirms, and lets him go, keeping ahold of his shoulder long enough to make sure he’s steady before he crouches down to pick up the dropped crutch, handing it back.  “Be near the radio, okay?”

“Couldn’t tear me away, kiddo.”

Raleigh kisses him on the cheek.  “Love you, Yancy. Sorry about all this shit.”

“Not your fault the world’s ending,” Yancy calls after him as he dashes away. But he kind of knows that’s Raleigh’s goodbye.

He hopes it’s not the last one.

 

Yancy’s shoulders are aching, his spine is starting to complain, and his hands are going a little numb, but this is more important.  He collapses into a chair behind Tendo’s, fumbling for his pills. Technically, he probably shouldn’t be taking them again, since it’s not long since the last round. But he’s going to be feeling this shit tomorrow, he doesn’t want to feel it now.  Herc’s standing on the other side of him, looking markedly less relaxed than he had a few hours ago, although Yancy suspects he wasn’t nearly as impaired then as he’d pretended to be. 

Striker’s still covered in crews, though.  But if Herc’s here—

“Where’s the Marshal?”

“He’s going to drive Striker with baby Hansen,” Tendo tells him.

Yancy isn’t unaware of Pentecost’s health problems, although he’s not very well acquainted with them—he’d known there must be a reason the man wasn’t in a Jaeger anymore: even with the suit and the easy hold on command, he’s not what Herc likes to call “a suit”.  He’s still a pilot. “Is that—”

“Shh, Becket,” Herc says, “Choi, are the kaiju still circling the Breach?”

“Yep. Same old, same old. Our instruments are still taking their reads, but they both look like Category IV.”

“What’ve we got?”  Yancy asks, when neither of them shows any more sign of saying anything vital.

“Striker and Gipsy drop in a few hours—the kaiju aren’t moving towards shore, so we’re going to finish repairs on Gipsy—Striker’s almost done, not as much damage—unless they start moving. Then it’s another two to the Breach, twenty minutes on the full descent, probably.  Two Cat. IVs circling the breach, prelim scans aren’t showing much because they’re too far off.  When the Jaegers get closer, we’ll get better reads.  Then they take down the kaiju and Striker drops the bomb, the Breach dissolves, and everybody gets home safe and happy.”

Both Yancy and Herc give him the exact same look.

“Don’t be pessimistic, guys.”

“Just do your job,” Herc finally orders him, sounding brittle and irritated.

“Yes, sir.”

Yancy notices Herc doesn’t correct the “sir”.  Guy must be wound pretty tight, with his kid and his best friend piloting a giant robot into hell.  He knows he is. “What’re the teams doing now?”

“Kids’re all three working on Gipsy now; Marshal’s looking over Striker’s schematics. Surprised Mako let Chuck get anywhere near ‘Lady Danger’, but—”

“All hands on deck means all hands,” Herc says shortly.  “Watch your console, Choi.  Yancy, stop distracting him.”

With nothing to do but watch the steadily circling signals, Tendo punches in the buttons to run an instrument check again.  The lights on the console light up one after the other, green, green, green, red, green. “Huh.  Consoles aren’t hooked up to each other, that’s weird.”

“Fix it,” Herc snaps.

Yancy reaches back to jimmy the cord snaking up the leg of the console directly behind them. The light turns green. “Thank you, Captain Becket.”

“You’re very welcome, Mr. Choi.”

Herc is giving the both of them very unimpressed looks.

 

Gipsy’s fixed in a hot four and a half hours.  They’re locking into transports five minutes after that, pilots strapping into their Jaegers. “Striker Eureka, ready for transport,” Chuck’s voice says over the radio as the hangar doors begin to open.

“Gipsy Danger, ready for transport.”

“Lift initiating,” Tendo says into the microphone.  “Settle in for the long haul, ladies.”

“Fuck off, Choi.”

“He’s talking about the Jaegers, Chuck,” Herc says, leaning in towards his mic.

“Right.”

The next fifteen minutes are dominated by the Marshal giving orders and covering strategy, which is entirely uninterrupted by Chuck or Raleigh arguing, a miracle in and of itself.  Yancy tunes out, mostly listening to Raleigh’s occasional “yes, sir”s, and only snaps back into real time when a something nudges his ankle.

It’s Chuck’s dog.  Yancy can’t bend down to pet him because of his back, but he rubs his ankle against him, trying to distract himself.

Silence falls.  It takes about ten minutes until Raleigh’s voice crackles over the radio.  “In-flight movie’s pretty boring, LOCCENT.”

“Sucks to suck, Becket the younger.”

“Hey, is my brother there?”

“Right here, kid.”  Yancy has to slide closer to Tendo’s mic to answer, noticing in the process that the comm is only to Gipsy, not to Striker.  Probably best that way. “What’s up?”

“Nothing’s up.  You should recount the prank war of ’18.”

Yancy glances up at Herc, who’s looking long-suffering, but not objecting. “You might want to sit down, Herc,” Yancy says to him, leaning away from the mic for a moment. “You look like hell.”

“Don’t we fucking all.  Marshal wouldn’t approve of storytime.”

“But you’re not going to stop me, are you.”

“Don’t give me time to regret that, Yancy.”

Yancy leans back into the microphone.  Tendo’s eyes are trained steadily on the kaiju signatures.  “Well, it started in the Icebox in the Fall of ’18...”

He draws the story out for a solid hour.  Gets a couple of good laughs out of his brother, a snort out of Tendo. Nothing from Herc, who is staring, stone-faced, at the diagrams as Tendo runs his third instrument check, but a few strangled noises from Mako that sort of make up for it.

They’re precisely ten miles off the drop site—Yancy thinks of it as the Miracle Mile, even though it’s basically the opposite—when a comm from Striker beeps onto the boards and closes his mouth against the sounds of the Marshal’s voice. “Striker Eureka, ready to initiate handshake.  Copy?”

“LOCCENT copies,” Herc says, standing immediately, and Tendo starts the countdown. The first few moments of the handshake never really register on the instruments, which go insane, but they quickly settle out to eighty-four percent, then climb.

“Eighty-eight,” Tendo reads off, “Ninety, ninety-two—ninety-two—” A long pause.  “Striker, your drift’s hovering around a seven percent wave variance.”

“Damn,” Yancy says. “He’s good.”

“They both are,” Herc interrupts, then turns the radio back on.  ”Striker, preparing to disengage transport, Gipsy, prepare to initiate neural handshake.”

The fifteen-count starts again as the reply, _copy_ , comes back from Striker. Yancy swallows around a mouthful of air, suddenly dry-throated.  He’s never been around for the start of one of their Drifts before—but after a minute, the numbers settle into manageability.  “Ninety-five percent—ninety-six.  Gipsy, you good to go?”

“We’re good,” Raleigh’s voice comes.  “Open all shields, ready to submerge.”

Tendo glances at Yancy, and Yancy reads him instantly, leaning into the mic. “Gipsy, transport is disengaging now. Good luck down there.“

“Copy,” his brother replies, businesslike.  Yancy chokes down the sound of it, lodges it in his throat and memorizes it. He can almost feel Raleigh’s thrum of excitement and fear over the airwaves.  As they drop into the ocean, the signal shivers for a moment, then stabilizes.

“Both Jaegers holding air seals, oxygen at full capacity,” Tendo calls out. “Half a mile from the big drop for Gipsy, abut three fourths for Striker.  The reads on the kaiju are two Cat. IVs all right, circling the Breach, code names Scunner and Raiju.”

If they finish this, Yancy is going to have a talk with Tendo about his naming abilities.

Herc repeats the information over the connection as Striker comes into line with Gipsy and passes her.  “Half a mile to the ocean cliff, we jump,"  Pentecost says, voice cool.  "Three thousand metres to the Breach.”

Time starts passing too fast in LOCCENT.

Raiju circles Gipsy.  Raleigh’s voice has fear riding under his responses and Yancy wants to be in the cockpit with him in the dark, needs to be there next to his brother.  Needs to be able to see it.  To feel it.  To fight it off with him, because being here watching it without being able to _do_ anything is suddenly torture.

The kaiju are stopping.  He leans forward in his seat, ignoring how it makes his spine twinge, and has a bad feeling about it the same time as the Striker draws to a halt.  “ _Why are they stopping_?”

For all the things Yancy has heard the Marshal yell, never once has it been a question that wasn’t rhetorical.  The part of him in awe of the man is confused, because the Marshal doesn’t _ask questions_ like this, not ones he doesn’t know the answer to, other people ask _him_ questions.

“Something’s not right.”

He’s right. Something isn’t. Yancy’s spine is crawling, and not with the position he’s putting it in.  It feels like the buildup to a horror movie jump scare.  “Striker,” Herc is saying, but Smart and Smarter are scrambling into the room, the squirrely tattooed one before the other one, are screaming into the mic, are crammed with the three of them behind the desk, watching the screens.

Yancy wants to tell him that the words _ride it into the Breach_ are amongst the most ridiculous he’s ever heard, because no one who’s ever been up close and personal with a live kaiju would think that they’d just let you do that. But he doesn’t, because Herc is ordering the go-ahead, like a person who's never been up close and personal with a live kaiju.

He’s not paying attention to Tendo, he’s watching Gipsy’s vitals. But the pen clatters out of his mouth, and Yancy glances at him, and he’s gaping. “Oh, god—sir, there’s a third signature emerging from the Breach.”

Three Jaegers couldn’t take two kaiju.  Can two take three?

"What is it?"

“Category V. First ever.”

He knows Mako can’t hear him, and  God’s probably not listening, if he exists, but he’s thinking _You get his ass back here when this is over.  You bring him home_.

All that’s coming over the radios now is yelling, in three different accents, mostly, and with different degrees of fear and command.  The instruments are lighting up in red and green and his eyes are crossing trying to keep an eye on all of them, the kaiju and the Jaegers on the map and Gipsy’s structural damage, her pilots’ vitals.

Pentecost has already made a sacrifice tonight, but he's making another one now.

When Raleigh says, “I hear you, sir.  Heading for the Breach.  Structural damage is at eighty percent,” Yancy has never been more proud of him. Not when he graduated high school, not when they first stepped into Gipsy, not when Raleigh piloted a Jaeger back to shore by himself.  This is Raleigh in the quiet and calm of a thing, making a decision, taking an order, this is Raleigh probably about to die in his _walking nuclear reactor_ on a bare glimpse of a plan. He’s never been more proud of him and he’s never been more afraid, and as Striker blows with its pilots inside it, he wonders if Herc felt the same about his kid just at the end as he feels now about his little brother.

The loss seems to hit the man like a physical blow, and Yancy feels ill imagining the same for himself, although—he doesn’t have the ghost Drift anymore. He won’t _feel_ it.  A small mercy, but he doesn’t know how Herc is still standing.

It’s hard to pay attention to him, though, when there is a kaiju signature rising again, Knifehead coming to mind once more.  _Can’t get your extra headshots in now, kid, can you_ , he’s thinking bitterly, preparing himself for the same thing as Herc, for the little green light to wink off the screen and his brother’s vitals to go dead.

But instead, they’re falling into the Breach.  “That’s it, they’re in.”  Yancy wants to collapse in relief, but there’s limited point in that, since this is technically the _start_ of the plan. “He’s giving her his oxygen.”

Of course he is.  Yancy could kill him, the stupid selfless martyr, but it’s looking like he won’t have to.

“Raleigh, your oxygen levels are critical.  You don’t have much time.”

No, he fucking doesn’t.  Yancy almost takes the microphone away to tell him to just leave, that it’s not that important, but it is and he knows it, more important to the rest of the world than his brother coming home is to him, so he pushes down his shaking hands and drops his head, looking away already.  He’s not Herc Hansen, he can’t just stand there for—

“One pod is ejecting.  No detonation.”

“LOCCENT,” Raleigh’s voice comes, steadier than Yancy’s would be in the same position, god, he’s so fucking proud of his brother, he should have told him that, “if you can still hear me, meltdown initiated.  Reactor override—now.”

The countdown seems too fast.

Raleigh’s pod is away, though—as the Breach collapses they lose the track on it for a few moments, but Tendo is saying, “Direct hit!  The Breach has collapsed!” and the room is bursting into cheers. Yancy doesn’t join in until the track on the pod reappears, rising fast towards the surface.

The joy all sinks out of him when he glances up at the vitals reading on the pod and sees nothing there.  “It could be the instruments,” Tendo says to him, and the part of him that’s still even slightly engaged with the rest of the room realizes that all eyes are on him.

“Yeah,” he replies, and can hear his voice cracking.

“I can’t find his pulse,” Mako’s voice comes over the comms.  “I don’t think he’s breathing—”

Yancy closes his eyes and wills himself to go numb the same way he did after Mom died. Wills himself not to cry here. “Tendo says it could be the sensors,” he says, voice hoarse and desperate as he grabs the microphone away. “Can’t get a good read on his pulse through the suit, maybe—”

She’s crying.  She’s crying and Yancy’s chest has constricted and his heart might as well stop now. Raleigh’s grin flashes through his head, in a hundred different iterations, and he bites his tongue so hard it bleeds against the prickling feeling in his eyes and his nose and his throat.

Then she gasps, audible over the radio, and Raleigh’s voice filters through the room, rough.  “I couldn’t breathe.”

The room erupts in cheers again and this time Yancy can’t really join them, because _now_ he’s fucking crying. Tendo has an arm slung around him and he can’t stop, he’s grinning so wide his face feels like it’s going to break.

He’s going to kiss Mako, and then he’s going to let the two of them beat him up together.

* * *

 

He finds Herc after the clock stops, sitting outside the LOCCENT office with his head in his hands, and drops into the seat beside him.  “Don’t think Pentecost would have jettisoned the kid?” He’s careful not to say Chuck’s name.

“He took Striker’s escape pods out about a year ago.  ‘s against regulation, but he didn’t want them and I didn’t tell him no.”  Yancy wants to say something impressive like _it’s how he would have wanted to go_ in response, but Herc doesn’t need to hear that from him.  “Go find your brother and celebrate, Captain,” Herc orders after they’ve been silent for a while.

His voice is exhausted.

"I'm sorry, sir," Yancy tells him, as sincere as he can be, and pushes Max away when he noses up to his ankle again.

Then he leaves the two of them alone.


	11. Hong Kong; February 2025.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this feels somewhat short and needlessly cute, but then i realized that 'needlessly cute' isn't something that's ever needless for me.
> 
> alternate title: the epilogue

Raleigh steps out of the chopper with his copilot and Yancy is waiting on the pad for him.  Sitting on the pad in a spare, crappy wheelchair, actually, because his back or his hips or whatever it had been had utterly given out on him halfway of the way here and he’d had to wait for one of his cadets to come down and rescue him before he could keep going.

He feels like absolute hell, physically—his arms and his shoulders and his back and his leg and his hips and well, just about everything’s complaining, but his brother has a bright smile on his face and he’s dragging Mako behind him by one hand as he comes over, ignoring the doctors who chase the two of them across the tarmac.

He hasn’t seen that real, proper smile for ages, it seems like.  Raleigh hugs him, one-armed because it’s hard to hug a man in a wheelchair and because he won’t let go of his copilot’s hand.  “You guys k—kicked ass,” he says, finally, when Raleigh pulls back.  “I’m so damn proud of you.”

Better late than never.  The both of them grin, the stretches of teeth weirdly identical.  “Aw, are you going to cry on me, old man?”

“Do you hear this snot-nosed brat?”  Yancy says, turning to Mako.   “No respect for his elders.  Now let’s go let medical poke you with needles before they decide that it’s my fault you’re not there already.”

They keep Raleigh overnight, after running every test under the sun.  Mako stays with him, but Yancy leaves the two of alone after a little while, because he’ll fuck up his back even worse if he sleeps sitting up and because he thinks they need a little alone time.

They’re talking quietly when he rolls out, Mako’s chin resting on the side of the bed the same way Raleigh sat with him some days after Knifehead.

* * *

 

When Yancy wheels his way to Herc’s office—formerly Pentecost’s—for the first time three days later, the man is staring at a stack of paper blankly, a pen in one hand and a cold cup of coffee on the table in front of him.

It’s not the _Fuck Off_ mug.  Yancy guesses that’s probably best.  “Yancy,” Herc greets him when he finally looks up and sees him.  “C’mon in.”

Yancy doesn’t point out that he’s already in.  “Hey.  What’s the dead tree on your desk for?”

Herc doesn’t laugh, like he doesn’t get the joke for a moment, just stares at the papers and then snorts humourlessly.  “Eight fucking kinds of press releases, information requests, interview requests, everything under the fucking sun you can put in writing.”

“Want some help?”

“Don’t need any, but if you want to check some boxes, be my guest,” On his way to obey, Yancy almost rolls right over Max, who is lying, dejected, right in the way.  Sighing, Herc gets up to nudge him aside with a foot so Yancy can get across the narrow bridge between the door and the main part of the office.  “Damn dog’s been moping for a couple of days now,” he says, like he doesn’t know why that is.  “As annoying as it was, I almost miss him running around like he owned the fucking place.”

He’s not talking about the dog and the both of them know it, but Yancy does him the grace of not pointing it out.  “He’ll live,” he comments instead, grabbing a pen and half a stack of what look like press releases.  “Bulldogs’re hardy like that.”

Herc snorts again.  Yancy gets the idea this is the noise he makes when he can’t bring himself to say anything, but doesn’t want to ignore you.

It’s a few minutes of silence and he’s starting to get lost in figuring out how this story will go over before Herc finally does speak. “You need something, or just feeling helpful?”

“Just bored.  Hadn’t seen you in a couple of days, figured I should check in.  And Raleigh and Mako are in our quarters, so I decided I should make myself scarce.”

Herc looks up, brow furrowing.  “They together now?”

Yancy lets out a laugh.  “I’m not sure, he might propose before he gets around to asking her to dinner.”

“Well, tell him to watch his step.  He hurts her and half the technicians in the ‘dome’ll want to tear out his heart.”

“I’m pretty sure if he hurt her he’d make the first incision and then beg them to finish the job,” Yancy tells him drily, turning a page and raising his eyebrows.  “He’s so in love it’s sickening.”

A few more minutes pass quietly.  Max is now lying on Herc’s feet, wheezing quietly.  It’s distracting for Yancy, but Herc doesn’t even seem to notice it.  “—Hollywood wants to make a movie about your brother.”

“Tell them if they make it a porno I’ll agree to star as his impersonator,” Yancy replies casually, tapping his bottom lip with the end of his pen as he reads.

Herc lets out a single bark of laughter at that, which Yancy elects to consider a job well done.

 

Raleigh climbs into the upper bunk in the dark, and usually Yancy would be asleep and unaware, but tonight his back is killing him and sleep just isn’t fucking happening, so instead he says, “Finally unjoined at the hip from your better half?”, because yeah, actually, this probably is about the first time since Pitfall he’s seen the two of them part ways.  Which is fine with him.  It is.  Although he knows Raleigh’s not getting enough sleep because he’s too busy walking around the ‘dome with her, but then, when has Raleigh ever gotten enough sleep?

His brother almost falls off the ladder in shock at hearing his voice, Yancy can hear the clatter and then his crutches falling over as the bedframe they’re leaning against shakes.  “Yance, you’re up?”

“No, I’m talking in my sleep,” he says, and then Raleigh is swinging into his bunk, not as well-aimed as usual—the kid sits on his right leg.  Which, actually, is the best of all worlds, because if he’d landed on Yancy’s torso Yancy might have screamed, and he just doesn’t need that embarrassment.  “Ow,” he says anyway, and Raleigh murmurs an apology as he gets off.  “I’m trying to sleep here.”

“If that were true you’d be sleeping,” Raleigh points out, and yeah, Yancy’s got to give him that one.  “Mako flew out to Oblivion Bay to get some stuff.”

“What, and you’re not with her?”

“We figured one of us had better stay.  Besides,” Raleigh says, “She’s got her stuff.  I got mine.”

He punches Yancy on the shoulder, and Yancy ruffles his hair in the dark, a smile on his face even though he knows Raleigh can’t see it.  Raleigh doesn’t need to.  “Yeah, kid.  Besides, you need to learn how to function by yourself again sometime.  Can’t stay surgically attached to her forever.”

“Fuck off, Yancy,” Raleigh tells him, then leans against his shoulder.

“No, I’m serious, you two are disgusting.”

“We’re not in _elementary school_ anymore, Yance.  Girls don’t have cooties.  Not that you’d know, since you probably haven’t touched one since—”

“I wouldn’t make that bet, kid, I think you’ll lose it.  Besides, I’d bet my other leg you haven’t even kissed her yet.”

Raleigh wet-willies him, because they’re never not going to be brothers, even though Yancy’s pushing thirty and Raleigh just saved the whole damn world.  What ensues ends in Yancy saying, “Fuck, fuck, _uncle_ , you’re going to break my fucking spine, Raleigh, ow—“ and Raleigh pulling back so fast he falls off the side of the bed with a _thunk_.

“Sorry,” he says.

“So what you’re saying is I get to keep my leg.”

“Shut up.”

“Guess that explains why half the Shatterdome doesn’t know your dirty talk sounds like bad porn.”

“It does _not_!”

And this, here, is Raleigh, sounding whiny, sounding like his little brother again.  Yancy can almost see the look on his face, indignant.  Raleigh never acts like this around anyone else; he can fake being calm and mature pretty well, these days, when he’s not sitting next to Yancy.  “Oh, god,” Yancy moans loudly, making it as graphic as he possibly can.  “Oh, _Mako_ , fuck me _harder—_ ”

“Stop it!”

“—ugh, read me the kaiju names on your kill list, Mako,”  Yancy continues as his brother flounders, seemingly conflicted between hurting him again and making him shut up.  “—say them _slower_ —oh god, you’re _so_ _amazing_ —”

“I’m going to—“

Someone bangs on the wall behind Yancy, making him jump, and a man’s voice, muffled, comes through the wall.  “Fucking shut him up, Mori!”

Yancy laughs so hard he cries as Raleigh sputters uselessly.

 

The funeral is nearly two weeks after Pitfall—a long wait, but there’s a lot of shit to arrange, all things considered.

Yancy has worn a suit exactly once in his life, at his mother’s funeral, a cheap, ugly, rented thing, and mercifully, they let them go in full dress uniform instead, which is a very large step up from having to wear a tie, in his opinion.

They have services over five coffins, two of them empty, and one urn gets a place of honour high above the floor of the hangar in the Hong Kong Shatterdome, where Crimson Typhoon used to dock.  Alexis and Sasha are going home, too, but later.  Pentecost’s coffin will be shipped off to Hawaii, to be buried even though there’s no body.  Chuck’s is going to go right back onto the shelves of whatever funeral home doled them out, because Herc, with his jaw clamped so tight he’s probably breaking a few teeth, had insisted that he didn’t see any point in burying something without his son in it.

The way he’d said it—stilted and awkward—made Yancy think it was something Chuck’d thought once, disparagingly about military funerals, pomp and circumstance, and the whole nine yards, but if that’s true or not is something he doesn’t need to make Herc tell him, so it doesn’t really matter.

The wall is lined with smiling photos.  The Kaidonovskys’ is clearly a candid, of a much younger couple than any of them knew, grinning at each other.  The Wei Tang brothers linked arm to arm, looking less identical when they’ve got their smiles on—Cheung’s tilts one way, Jin’s pulls wide at the opposite corner, and Hu’s got a little gap between his front teeth. Someone even got one out of Pentecost, standing with a teenaged Mako, whose hair was much shorter and dyed bright red.  Yancy can’t help but notice that Chuck’s is obviously from a newspaper article, it’s cropped so blatantly to remove words encroaching on it that he thinks he ought to have a talk about photoshop with whoever set that shit up.

He wonders: could Herc not find a single photo of his son smiling that wasn’t taken by a reporter?  He _knows_ which photo of Raleigh he’d have picked—one from before Knifehead, with Yancy’s arm around his shoulders, beaming a million-watts—but he’s so fucking happy he didn’t have to that he himself almost smiles at a funeral.

There are cameras fucking everywhere.  That’s probably why, even though Mako’s not crying—holding herself together with that same iron control that makes her so good with Raleigh—his brother doesn’t have his arm around her.  Yancy would do it—he’s got more of the press face for it; Raleigh’s persona is all sunshine and thoughtless giggles, while his is more or less just his real one—but he really, sincerely doubts that that Mako would appreciate looking like she needs that.

So he stands shoulder to shoulder with Tendo instead, balancing on his foot and what basically amounts to a couple of wooden blocks wrapped around a metal pole in the vague shape of a leg, in comparison with the prosthetic he had before, which still hasn’t been fixed.

Listens to the eulogies.

Thanks his lucky fucking stars he didn’t have to write one.

 

Raleigh takes Mako home directly after the funeral, and Herc disappears—probably to drink himself stupid, but Yancy figures that’s his prerogative as well as none of his fucking business, so he ends up in Tendo’s quarters afterwards, watching him video chat with Alison and his son, still wearing his suit and tie.  Yancy, for his part, stripped down to his undershirt the second he was out of range of the cameras, inside the ‘dome.

“I’m flying home in a couple of days,” Tendo says, right hand fidgeting with his ring while he speaks, grin on his face that’s almost exclusively for Alison.  “I’ll be back in the Icebox, probably restoring Jaegers again.  How’s Gabe?”

“Fine.  You missed his first step last night,” Alison replies, and Yancy, across the room, can _hear_ her eyebrow lifting.  “And I’m doing fine too, in case you were wondering.”

“Baby, c’mon,” Tendo pleads, sticking his bottom lip out.  He looks like a cartoon for a second, and it makes Yancy snort.  “Yance, when was the last time you saw Gabe?”

“Oh, is he there too?  Why hasn’t he come over to say hello?”

Yancy uses the wall to push himself up and carefully limps across the room, cautious of his balance, unused to this leg.  He drops down onto the bed next to Tendo, leaning against the wall, “Hey, Alison.  Saw the kid two months ago.”

She flashes the two of them a grin, then holds up her son, sitting him on her knee for the camera.  “Two months?  Too long.  Say hi to Uncle Yancy, Gabe.”

“Uh, no, I’m not _Uncle_ ,” Yancy protests, “That feels so _old_.”  But Gabe is smiling toothlessly at him and it’s kind of hard not to smile back.

“Say hi to Grandpa Yancy, Gabe,” Alison coos, and Tendo cracks up.

When Gabe says “Hi!  Ga-pa,” like that is an acceptable thing to call him and Tendo laughs harder, Yancy shoves his traitorous ass off the end of the bed.

* * *

 

“Your brother’s going on the interview circuit and _you_ are _not_ going,” Herc informs him when he asks what his marching orders are.  “So you can either head back to the Icebox, or you can come down to Sydney for a few months and help me deal with whatever shit he gets up to with Miss Mori until he gets back.”

Yancy sits down on the desk, because Herc’s not Pentecost and won’t ding him for it, and shrugs.  “Not that I’m arguing, but why am I not going?”

This is pretty much the definition of arguing, for him.

“Well, for starters, you fucking hate the press and you have a smart mouth on you, you’d be a pain in the arse and a half for me if you went.  Raleigh at least knows how to play nice with the flies.”

“Okay,” Yancy concedes.  “Fair.”

“So what’s your decision, Yancy?”

“Well, I’ve spent my entire life dealing with Raleigh’s shit,” Yancy tells him, shrugging one shoulder.  “Might as well learn how to do it remotely.”

“Good man,” Herc says, clapping him on the shoulder as he walks out, Max waddling along at his heels.  They’re doing a little better, the two of them.  Even if Herc is doing it by burying his head in his work.

If Yancy kind of smiles after them, nobody has to be any the wiser.

They’re going to be okay, eventually.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> k kids im done im out im finished
> 
> ...i'm probably writing some alison/yancy/tendo next tho lol i've become attached. maybe sometime i will write herc&yancy. maybe someday i will write mako&chuck. i'm definitely writing chuck/mako/raleigh at some point if i can manage to make myself. more character studies? idk. kill me


End file.
